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GROWING UP WITH AMERICA: MYTH, CHILDHOOD, AND NATIONAL IDENTITY FROM 1945-2011

EMILY A. MURPHY

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2014

To my family and loving boyfriend

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a dissertation involves long hours of solitude and an enormous amount of painstaking research and writing. For those who helped me complete this process, I am deeply grateful. My support team consisted of a number of family members, friends, and, of course, committee members. I want to give a special thanks to my co-directors,

Dr. Phillip Wegner and Dr. Anastasia Ulanowicz, who both read multiple drafts of my dissertation and provided invaluable support and guidance. Together, my directors made a phenomenal team that went above and beyond anything I have ever experienced in terms of mentorship. Dr. Ulanowicz listened in the early stages as I attempted to figure out what I wanted to write and she continued to foster my ideas at every stage of the dissertation writing process. Her confidence in my ideas and my ability to write about them gave me the energy to keep writing even when things seemed hopeless. Phil, for his part, gave superb advice regarding professional development (from journals, to grants, to jobs) and never complained when I asked him countless questions about graduation or when I made a request for yet another letter of recommendation. Phil’s support helped me navigate the final stages of the dissertation, especially the balancing act of dissertation writing and job searching. Each of my other committee members have helped shape my intellectual career, and their influences are imprinted on the pages of this dissertation project. Without their group effort, I would not have completed this work or have envisioned such an ambitious project.

I also owe much to my family, who have provided the emotional support needed to complete a PhD. Graduate students know that one of the greatest challenges are the emotional ups and downs that one encounters over the years, whether it is stress about that upcoming deadline or fears about lack of funding over the dreaded summer

semester. My boyfriend, especially, listened for long hours as I talked (or, rather, complained) about the work I needed to complete, and the seemingly insurmountable amount of work ahead. Friends, especially Marilisa Jimenez, Anuja Madden, Missy

Molloy (and the ever cheerful Leo Molloy), provided laughs along the way. Marilisa, in particular, demonstrated what it means to be a friend and a colleague. I look forward to working with her during the rest of my career, and really “rocking it” as she would cheerfully say. In addition, my fellow children’s literature peers provided friendship and support in the form of a dissertation group: Mariko Turk, Casey Wilson, Anuja Madden, and Poushali Bhadury (though we missed her during her year in India) all deserve mention. Although more deserve praise, these are the people who provided the most assistance and I am forever in their debt.

I could not rightfully end my acknowledgements without mentioning my former committee member, Scott Nygren. In addition to being a valued committee member,

Scott was also my professor and a generous mentor. Scott encouraged me to organize my first conference panel, and upon hearing of the panel’s acceptance his response was a huge smile and a high five. He was one of the few who always genuinely wanted to know how I was doing and what I was up to in terms of my research. His generosity and kindness were constantly an inspiration to me, and he helped me learn to think about the world in ways I never had before. Without Scott, I could not call myself a filmmaker in addition to a researcher. I will always remember Scott’s contributions to my personal and professional development. My intellectual debt to Scott, in the words of

R.W.B. Lewis, “will be evident on many pages; [but] more important and less evident is a debt to the man himself, to a wise and dedicated teacher and an unforgettable friend.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 8

CHAPTER

1 THE “TRUE MYTH” OF AMERICA: CHILDHOOD AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN COLD WAR CULTURE ...... 10

Remaking America: Cold War Mythology and the Search for Identity ...... 14 Chapter Overview ...... 32 Conclusion ...... 36

2 “DEPLOY THE CHILD!”: AMERICAN NATIONAL MYTHS IN THE EARLY COLD WAR ...... 37

The Beyond Innocence Debate: A Brief Overview ...... 41 For the Love of Innocence: R.W.B. Lewis and the American Adam ...... 49 Growing Down: Henry Nash Smith and the Man Turned Boy Hero ...... 58 Bombs, Boys, and Legendary Fathers: Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness .. 66

3 AMERICAN ADAM (AND EVE): INNOCENCE, YOUTH, AND THE “AGE OF HOPELESSNESS” ...... 80

Dreaming Up Eve: A Male Writer’s Perspective ...... 83 Building a Female-Centered World ...... 86 The American Eve in Native Literature ...... 94 American Eve in Crisis: Aftereffects of 9/11 ...... 112

4 FROM VIRGIN LAND TO VIRGIN GIRL: NATURE, NOSTALGIA, AND AMERICAN EMPIRE ...... 126

From Virgin Land to Virgin Girl ...... 130 Immaculate Deaths in American Suburbia ...... 145 A Plague Shall Descend Upon Him: Power, Redemption, and Revenge ...... 161 The Many Roles of the Modern Virgin Girl ...... 163

5 EXTRAORDINARY BOYS ON AN ERRAND: RACE AND NATIONAL BELONGING IN NARRATIVES OF FATHERHOOD ...... 183

Failed Adoptions and the Love/Hate Relationship with China ...... 186 “Going Native”: White Guilt, Illegal Aliens, and the Problems of Black Fatherhood ...... 200 Commies in the Caribbean: A Critique of the Reagan Administration ...... 211

Native Fathers, Oriental Others, and American Discontent after September 11 ... 221 Sins of the Father: Zits’s Flight Through Time ...... 225

6 THE FUTURE OF “AMERICA”: CHILDHOOD, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE NEW US IDENTITY ...... 238

The Child of Many Nations, or the Child of No Nation: National Identity in a Global Era ...... 241 Globalizing the American Child: A Case Study of Chang Ta-Chun’s “Wild Child” . 246

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 264

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 277

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

GROWING UP WITH AMERICA: MYTH, CHILDHOOD, AND NATIONAL IDENTITY FROM 1945-2011

Emily A. Murphy

August 2014

Chair: Phillip Wegner Cochair: Anastasia Ulanowicz Major: English

My dissertation, “Growing Up With America: Myth, Childhood, and National

Identity from 1945-2011,” considers the deployment and renegotiation of American national myths in the period 1945-2011. In order to place larger changes affecting U.S. national identity into relief, especially the effects of globalization on domestic and foreign policy, my study expands beyond the temporal and national boundaries associated with the Cold War. I argue that childhood was for cultural and historical reasons integral to the articulation of competing narratives about U.S. national identity, a fact that few in American studies have previously acknowledged. I begin with a reassessment of landmark studies, including Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950) and R.W.B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), where childhood helped literary scholars construct a national narrative that supported the existing order at the time. I organize later chapters around the literary responses to Cold War interpretations of

American national myths like the American Adam, a figure that promotes fresh starts and a view of the U.S. as innocent, and its sister myth, the virgin land, which justifies

U.S. westward expansion by depicting the land as a passive, beautiful young woman

who welcomes the arrival of the male explorer. I illustrate how dissidents such as

Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), Linda Hogan (Solar Storms), and Sherman Alexie (Flight) were able to challenge dominant interpretations of U.S. national identity by inverting views of children as voiceless, vulnerable, and obedient. Finally, I gesture towards new ways of interpreting U.S. national identity with a case study of Taiwanese author Chang

Ta-Chun’s Wild Child (1996), a work whose analysis of childhood in Cold War Taiwan demonstrates one possible way to imagine the future of “America” in today’s globalized society.

CHAPTER 1 THE “TRUE MYTH” OF AMERICA: CHILDHOOD AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN COLD WAR CULTURE

That is the true myth of America. She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing off of the old skin, towards a new youth. It is the myth of America.

—D.H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature

As a native Floridian from the Greater Orlando area, I grew up hearing about the exploits of the Spanish conquistadors and the Northern homesteaders who attempted to conquer and tame the wild inhospitable land that I had learned to call home. Alligators and mosquitoes, swamps and sinkholes—these were just a few of the natural dangers that any Florida child could easily come into contact with on a day-to-day basis. The

Florida educational system instilled within us a healthy appreciation of our native state and the colonial history that shaped it. Rather than visit a famous president’s home, as a child in Virginia might do, we clattered up the steps of the Castillo de San Marcos in

St. Augustine. Having reached the pinnacle of the elementary school ladder, we fifth graders immersed ourselves in the land by trudging through a part of Florida’s natural aquifer. We started in the thick mud and ended in clear cool streams teeming with life.

Outside of school, I had the chance to explore the local fort where homesteaders protected themselves from their indigenous neighbors. I peeked outside the same holes where men fired muskets in order to protect stolen land. In this way, I learned from tactile experience and from the mediation of both the public school curriculum and the state and national park service that Florida was more than alligators and mosquitoes, more than swamps and sinkholes, and certainly more than the place too far south to be considered part of the South.

I grew up knowing these things, but others who had grown up elsewhere did not.

Although I could point my finger in any given direction and find an untamed area waiting for me, I regularly encountered those who assumed that my Central Florida home had been entirely paved over and permanently overridden by tourists. My Northern friends and acquaintances in particular insisted that I had no culture. These friends and acquaintances, much to my chagrin, insisted that Florida wasn’t Southern, and failed to offer up a regional category for my home state. As a result of these conversations and my childhood experiences, I came to understand that I was living in a place that resisted clear demarcation. Florida was a place that existed as a colony before the thirteen

“original” colonies, and this history resulted in an uncertainty regarding Florida identity. It was (and continues to be) a place of mixed heritage, in which the history of American

Indians, Spanish conquistadors, and Anglo-American settlers intermingle. The influx of immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean and Central and South

America has further added to the tension in a space competing for a single, central narrative that its history seemed to resist. Even now, it remains difficult to explain what it means to be a Floridian. This difficulty in providing a cogent narrative of Florida history is perhaps best exemplified by the images on Florida’s quarter coin: a space shuttle, a

Spanish ship, and an empty beach with palm trees. First established in 2004 as part of the U.S. Mint’s 50 State Quarters Program, the image captures beautifully the drive to conquer, control, and understand the space around us. The ship sails ever closer to the beach, always searching for new land, just as the shuttle searches the far reaches of space for the lands of the frontier.

I begin with these personal anecdotes and images from my childhood precisely because they underscore the relationship between myth, childhood, and national identity that is the subject of my dissertation project. The personal, educational, political, and even national narratives provided about Florida parallel those that help to form and shape U.S. national identity during crucial historical moments of transition and crisis.

Moreover, the use of childhood memories is not coincidental. As multiple childhood studies scholars, including Caroline Levander, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Carol Singley,

Anna Mae Duane, and Courtney Weikle-Mills, have noted the child has often served as a metaphor for the United States, both in the years before and after its inception as a nation. In earlier years, political figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas

Jefferson described the young country as an “infant nation” (Levander 5). As these men imagined a nation-state separate from England, they drew upon the parent-child metaphor, often depicting England as an irresponsible guardian incapable of caring for her many children. Such rhetoric provided an explanation for the U.S.’s break from

“Mother” England and even helped to mold a new national identity distinct from the

British. As Carol Singley notes, such metaphors often helped to alleviate the anxiety attached to this separation and gave U.S. citizens an opportunity to consider the unique traits of their new nation (4). Childhood, as these examples effectively demonstrate, is thus a key component of U.S. national identity.

The way that childhood serves to narrate national identity often takes the form of literary narratives; indeed, during the Revolutionary period and into the nineteenth- century, tropes drawn from adoption narratives helped U.S. citizens author their own narratives of national identity. This form of storytelling included personal and communal

forms that had the potential to reshape existing notions of U.S. national identity. U.S. citizens from a wide variety of backgrounds, including authors, politicians, and religious leaders, all found inspiration from the child, who helped them to think about the differences between England and America. In his famous Autobiography, Benjamin

Franklin popularized the belief in self-reliance as a defining trait of the American character, and he did so in part by expounding upon his familial origins and complicated relationship with his son, William. Writers like Harriet Wilson and Frederick Douglass similarly used the autobiography form in order to challenge the hypocrisy of religion and to denounce the system of slavery in the U.S. They also found it constructive to write about childhood and to use the child protagonist to critique American ideology and thus contribute to future understanding of the value and limits of concepts such as liberty and freedom.

What these earlier narratives have in common is a desire to answer the pressing question, first posed by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in 1782, “What does it mean to be an American?”1 This question would continue to baffle future generations, especially in those times when the nation underwent extensive changes. This search for national identity is especially evident during the period at the center of this dissertation,

1945-2011, a time when many felt the impact of the U.S.’s entrance into a global system and the effects of world leadership. The Cold War marked the first uneasy steps into a new position of global power and dominance, and thus required a new answer to the question, “What does it mean to be an American?” The answer was as varied and

1 I refer here to de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782).

textured as those who set out to answer it in the first place, and it would continue to change in later years as the Cold War pressure to conform lifted.

In an effort to map the development of U.S. national identity during the second- half of the twentieth century, I chart the deployment and renegotiation of multiple Cold

War myths that drew heavily upon conceptions of childhood. These myths include most prominently, the American Adam, the virgin land, and the errand into the wilderness.

The emergence of Cold War interpretations of these classic American myths launched a long debate regarding the nation’s values and interests. As I explain in my dissertation, one of the defining characteristics of this debate was the way in which childhood revealed itself, to quote D.H. Lawrence, as the “true myth” of America.

Remaking America: Cold War Mythology and the Search for Identity

In the Cold War period, scholars from the Myth and Symbol school, who would in subsequent years come to be known as “the Fathers” of American Studies,2 refashioned classic American mythology in order to define, describe, and celebrate U.S. national identity. Perry Miller, Henry Nash Smith, R.W.B. Lewis, and others each set out to answer a single, central question: “What does it mean to be an American?” Having reached maturity right when the U.S. entered the Second World War, many of these scholars served in the armed forces and returned home with a new outlook on U.S. culture. R.W.B. Lewis, for example, spoke of the transformation he underwent during his time stationed in Italy, recalling it as a moment that “was overwhelming.” “The impact of the quintessentially American book [Moby Dick] in that Tuscan-European environment,”

2 In his review of David Levin’s Exemplary Elders (1990), Gregory Pfitzer observes that the leaders of American Studies, which include Perry Miller, R.W.B. Lewis, and Henry Nash Smith, among others, received harsh criticism for their methods and views. The critics of these leaders, he claims, “had to ritualistically ‘kill their fathers’ in order to make room for new methods and theories” (534). For an example of this criticism, see the special thirtieth anniversary edition of American Quarterly (volume 31, no. 3).

writes Lewis, “led me to wonder for the first time about the phenomenon of being an

American, about American habits of speech and behavior as contrasted with the

European varieties, about American literature and its own characteristics and traditions”

(Literary Reflections xvi). Perry Miller’s service in Africa and Europe cemented his earlier decision to turn his attention to American literature and culture. As a young man,

Miller had sailed to the Congo and worked on an oil ship, unaware that in a few decades the Congo, as a newly independent nation, would be part of the U.S.’s fight against

Communism. Miller’s narration of his experience abroad echoes Lewis’s words, and he describes in the preface to Errand into the Wilderness an epiphany upon reaching

Africa: “The adventures that Africa afforded were tawdry enough, but it became the setting for a sudden epiphany (if the word be not too strong) of the pressing necessity for expounding my America to the twentieth century” (vii). Even those who failed to cross national boundaries felt inspired in the wake of the U.S.’s victory in Europe and the Pacific. Henry Nash Smith, who refrained from military service, worked tirelessly to unravel uniquely American themes, traditions, and traits.

As the first theoretical school of American Studies, Myth and Symbol scholars organized their work around a set of uniquely American themes or symbols, such as the virgin land or the American Adam, and used them to explain the defining characteristics of U.S. culture. Popular studies that emerged from this school include Henry Nash

Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Myth and Symbol (1950), R.W.B. Lewis’s

The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century

(1955), Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956), and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964). While each of these

studies differs dramatically in terms of its organization—Miller’s, for example, is a collection of previously published essays—each author subscribed to the methodology of the Myth and Symbol school. This method, as Smith himself famously described in his essay, “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method?” (1957) entails first and foremost an interdisciplinary approach to literature (11). This is why studies like Virgin

Land expand beyond traditional literary analysis in order to examine history, politics, and literary and popular culture.

The other, and perhaps most important defining trait of this school, is the implicit understanding that myth is not only an object of study but also a technique for analyzing

U.S. literature and culture. To better understand how myth operates in these works, and why such a technique was so significant in the Cold War context, it is necessary to first review some of the basic definitions of myth. In the Oxford English Dictionary myth is defined as “A traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon.” As this definition suggests, there are two key aspects to any myth: its narrative structure, or story-like qualities, and its ability to make sense out of complicated experiences or events. This understanding of myth is shared by Henry Nash Smith, one of the leading scholars of the Myth and Symbol School, who provides a very similar definition in the preface to his study of the American West.3 “I use the words [myth and symbol],” writes

3 Smith’s definition of myth, while conceived about the same time as Roland Barthes was writing his essays that would eventually be published as Mythologies (1956), does not have a relationship with Barthes’s. Barthes is concerned with contemporary myths in French popular culture, and he defines this myth as a “language” (11). For Barthes, myth can quite literally be anything. As opposed to Smith, who defines myth as an “image,” Barthes claims that myth is not simply “an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form” (109).

Smith, “to designate larger or smaller units of the same kind of thing, namely an intellectual construction that fuses concept and emotion into an image” (xi). Smith would later revise this definition in the twentieth anniversary edition of Virgin Land, adding that what he really meant to say was that myth is an “imaginative construction” with the capacity to “express collective desires and impose coherence on the infinitely numerous and infinitely varied data of experience” (vii, ix). Myth in this second more precise definition is a way to make meaning out of one’s experience, and is in this case used to identify U.S. experience in the nineteenth century. Smith’s definition does not depart so very far from the standard dictionary definition; his understanding of myth was shared by his peers in the Myth and Symbol school, and did not become a source of scholarly debate until much later.

The simplistic definition of myth that Smith provides, while deeply flawed, is useful as a starting point. It serves as a reminder that myth is indeed a storytelling mechanism, one that allows the author to take a series of events or experiences and translate them into narrative form. That is, myth allows the author to instill coherence on an otherwise incoherent set of data. The need for coherence was in fact a key concern for Myth and Symbol scholars, who wanted desperately to understand what it meant to be an American. Myths like the virgin land, the American Adam, and the errand into the wilderness allowed men like Smith to organize their research around a single, central idea. In addition to enabling them to present prior U.S. history and culture in an organized fashion, myth also helped them to understand their contemporary experiences in the early Cold War. This is why authors like R.W.B. Lewis begin and end their studies with references to “the problem” facing contemporary Americans. Bringing

together the past and the present, Myth and Symbol scholars utilized myth in a fashion similar to the authors they studied. They were, in a very real sense, storytellers, and their story was that of Cold War America.

In order to tell their stories, Myth and Symbol scholars needed to diverge from the conventional understanding of myth. Rather than a way simply to make meaning out of complex experiences, myth was also a way to distort, or disfigure, these experiences so that they conformed to the ideals of the Myth and Symbol scholars. Like a traditional narrative in Western literature, Myth and Symbol scholars were looking for a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Richard Slotkin argues in his own landmark study of myth and the American West that a clear narrative structure is one of the most basic components of myth and imperative in order for it to achieve its goals:

Myth expresses ideology in a narrative, rather than discursive or argumentative, structure. Its language is metaphorical and suggestive rather than logical and analytical. The movement of a mythic narrative, like that of any story, implies a theory of cause-and-effect and therefore a theory of history (or even of cosmology); but these ideas are offered in a form that disarms critical analysis by its appeal to the structures and traditions of story-telling and the clichés of historical memory. (6)

Slotkin’s definition builds upon the basic definition of myth by identifying the distorting effect that occurs when personal or societal experience is organized into narrative form.

Such a narrative is certainly important, but it also requires the storyteller to remove any details that do not fit into the larger structure, thereby ignoring controversial issues that challenge the authors’ interpretation of historical events. This is why in the scholarship of the Myth and Symbol school it is rare to find extended discussions of racial issues that were in fact central to the early history of the United States. Westward expansion, for example, is simplified into a glorified quest into nature that is untouched by blood.

Western heroes like Daniel Boone and Kit Carson might suffer, but their suffering never

becomes a pretext for launching an analysis of U.S.-Native American relations, nor does it become a means for critiquing the violence that was a defining feature of U.S. imperialism. Something similar can be said in relation to gender. Myth and Symbol scholarship is filled with male characters, leaving little room for consideration of female experience. Women’s experiences in the burgeoning nation simply do not factor into these authors’ rendition of U.S. history.

These critiques are by no means new, but they play a central role in my own story about the role of American mythology during the Cold War.4 As more recent scholars in American studies note, it is important to recognize the narrative structure of

Myth and Symbol scholarship. These myths, Donald Pease maintains, helped to support the fantasy of American exceptionalism. Pease explains in his book, The New

American Exceptionalism (2009), the ways the academy often collaborated with the

U.S. government in order to support the nation’s interests abroad:

U.S. policymakers depended upon the fantasy of American exceptionalism to authorize their practices of governance, but historians and literary scholars turned the beliefs embedded within the fantasy into the principles of selection through which they decided what historical events they would allow representation within the historical record and which literary works they would include within the U.S. canon. (11)

Literary scholars like Perry Miller, Henry Nash Smith, and R.W.B. Lewis utilized myth in order to reorder and reorganize history in a manner that fit with what Pease, drawing upon the work of Jacqueline Rose, calls “state fantasies.”5 In the Cold War context, this

4 Since those who continued the story about Cold War America were primarily concerned with the lack of representation of women and racial minorities, the contemporary critiques of the Myth and Symbol school remain relevant in my own project. Additionally, age, a factor that has yet to be considered, is central to my interpretation of the progression of the national narratives that gained the status of myth in the 1950s.

5 In the introduction to her book, States of Fantasy (1996), Rose explains that “there is no way of understanding political identities and destinies without letting fantasy into the frame. More, that fantasy…plays a central, constitutive role in the modern world of states and nations” (4). Pease develops

reigning state fantasy was American exceptionalism—the belief in the U.S.’s fundamental difference from other nations. Myths, in Pease’s formulation, act as support for a larger framework that allows citizens to define, imagine, and interpret their relation to the state and the laws that enforce its power. Myths do not define the order; rather, they draw upon powerful images, themes, and symbols that support that order.

Amy Kaplan makes a similar argument regarding the use of myth in Cold War culture in her seminal essay, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the

Study of American Culture” (1993). In this essay, Kaplan persuasively argues that prominent myth-symbol scholars drew upon their adventures abroad in order to redefine their world back home. Kaplan provides the example of Perry Miller’s experience unloading oil barrels in the Congo, but one might also include R.W.B. Lewis, whose war experiences in Italy prompted his writing of The American Adam. Myth-symbol scholars like Miller and Lewis, Kaplan argues, refashioned their experiences so that they conformed to the heroic model of the frontier tale, accounts where a white male stands nobly alone in the wilderness (9). Even those who never left the shores of the United

States found heroic models such as the frontier tale useful when it came to interpreting

American experience. Such tales were the cornerstone of the state fantasy of U.S. exceptionalism, and “enabled U.S. citizens to define, support, and defend the U.S. national identity” (Pease 11). The foreign/domestic dichotomy, or even what one might call a home-away-home structure,6 allowed their authors to discover the key attributes of U.S. national identity that were previously hidden from them, presumably because

Rose’s idea in order to interpret the actions of the state: the narratives it creates about itself in order to maintain order and rule over its citizens.

6 The home-away-home structure is a classic trope of children’s literature. See Perry Nodelman’s The Hidden Adult (2008) for a thorough discussion of this trope.

they lacked distance from their “home” culture.

In both Pease and Kaplan’s analyses of the narrative structure of Myth and

Symbol scholarship, myth is a way for U.S. citizens to imagine their relation to the state.

Such imaginative acts are given to privileged white males who already have the authority to authenticate national narratives and even contribute to these narratives by adding new stories or renditions of previous stories. Indeed, much of the work of the

Myth and Symbol scholars entailed “updating” American mythology so that it spoke more directly to a Cold War audience. Perry Miller maintains in the preface to Errand into the Wilderness that one of the most important tasks he undertook in his study was determining what the nation’s errand was in the Cold War, and how this new mission either authenticates or dismantles the Pilgrim’s original errand.

In her recent study of conceptions of national identity in early American literature,

Courtney Weikle-Mills defines imaginary acts like the ones I am describing here as producing “imaginary citizenship.” However, Weikle-Mills departs from the understanding of these imaginary acts by American studies’ scholars like Pease by restricting them to those not granted citizenship status. Imaginary citizens, writes

Weikle-Mills, are “individuals who could not exercise civic rights but who figured heavily in literary depictions of citizenship and were often invited to view themselves as citizens despite their limited political franchise” (4). Weikle-Mills is concerned specifically with children, but she acknowledges that groups defined as “metaphorical children” are also imaginary citizens (16). African Americans, Native Americans, and other historically marginalized groups have each had rights removed from them because they were thought to have more in common with children than adults, and therefore needed the

care of a guardian who could make decisions about their lives for them.

The distinction between full citizens, citizens-in-progress, and non-citizens recognizes the differences between approved and non-approved storytellers. The Myth and Symbol school is an example of the former category, where white men attending

Ivy League schools like Harvard University worked together in a patriarchal society that privileged white male authority. In many cases, they received the support of their university in order to publish works that would eventually define their careers, and were able to circulate their narratives to other similarly minded scholars who were also rethinking U.S. national identity. Thus, what we conventionally think of as “debates” were really story-telling sessions, where one author swapped stories with another in order to continue the process of defining and describing U.S. national identity.

In contrast to these approved storytellers, there were others who fell into the latter two categories, who were similarly interested in the question “What does it mean to be an American?,” but who did not always receive that same support. An example of a citizen-in-progress is Vladimir Nabokov, who was legally a U.S. citizen by the time he began writing Lolita (1955), but whose status as a Russian immigrant would make him automatically suspect in the early Cold War. Authors like Nabokov play off this suspicion and use it to their advantage in order to challenge national narratives. These “non- approved” storytellers manage to invert the meaning of the reigning national narratives by using myth as a way of disorganizing rather than organizing cultural experiences.

Such a shake-up shocks readers familiar with the tropes of popular myths and challenges the order that these same myths are intended to support (e.g., American exceptionalism).

What both approved and non-approved storytellers had in common was an understanding of the symbolic power of childhood. In literary criticism and novels that span the period 1945-2011, a range of work appeared where the child helped to figure and give shape to U.S. national identity. For this reason, I refer to the “figure of the child” throughout my project, since it was the imaginary act of figuring that helped these authors—whether scholars or novelists—think through questions of U.S. national identity. Carolyn Steedman argues in her study of childhood and human interiority that figures such as the child were “used for the purposes of personification, to give a name and a face (and a body…) to abstract ideas and bodies of theory” (19). Figures,

Steedman notes, differ from symbols because they do not simply stand in for something else (e.g., a dove that symbolizes peace); rather, the figure is a way for a culture to give body to ideas that would otherwise be difficult to process. To figure, then, is to put together an idea until it quite literally takes shape (Steedman provides the example of

Mignon, the small, deformed child acrobat from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s

Apprenticeship [1795-6]).7 The term is derived from its Latin roots, figura, which means to “shape” or “form.” In later chapters, as I trace the evolution of Cold War myths in

American culture, I will continue to use the word “figure” in order to denote this shaping process, an act where both scholars and authors worked through a plethora of ideas regarding the nation by bringing them together in the bodily form of the child.

The privileging of the child in Cold War texts is, as I previously noted, by no means unique. In fact, the Cold War use of the figure of the child continues a much longer history where the child was integral to the articulation of U.S. national identity. In

7 Steedman traces the emergence and development of this child figure in nineteenth-century English culture.

Cradle of Liberty (2006), Caroline Levander explains that the very origin of the word nation “meaning ‘to be born’…derives from the idea of the child” (7).8 This connection between childhood and nation was not lost on early Americans, who often considered the U.S. an “infant nation,” and would even describe themselves when speaking in religious terms as “children.” Such language allowed early Americans to think in terms of familial relations, and to manipulate these relations so that they worked to their advantage. Within the context of the Revolutionary period, Patriots depicted England as an unfit “Mother,” whose parental authority no longer held sway precisely because she had abused her loyal and trusting children. These familial narratives enabled “writers [to embrace] a mythology of fresh starts afforded by the genealogical break with the birth country” (Singley 7). Courtney Weikle-Mills adds that Patriots would also alternate during the Revolutionary War between identifying themselves as honest and obedient children and unruly ones (2). Weikle-Mills adds that the influence of childhood on U.S. national identity, while not unique, did become an integral part of the young nation’s identity. This occurred in part because Americans understood the relative youth of their nation in comparison to those in Europe as a defining factor of U.S. national identity (8-

9). In these examples, the child serves as a way to assert the nation’s independence and begin the process of defining U.S. national identity.

This process did not end with the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, but rather grew and developed, much as a real child. By the end of the Second World War, U.S. citizens no longer viewed themselves as “children,” but instead began to identify more strongly with adolescents. The adolescent became a useful transitional figure, since

8 Christopher (Kit) Kelen and Björn Sundmark make a similar argument about the relationship between “nation” and “childhood” in the introduction to The Nation in Children’s Literature: Nations of Childhood (2013).

adolescence is understood as the moment when a child is perched between childhood and adulthood. Adolescents are still legally children, but they are beginning to look and behave more like adults, especially in terms of their ability to reason. A lack of reason was according to Enlightenment theory one of the primary reasons why children were excluded from citizenship. The figure of the adolescent also connects to the U.S.’s early history, as adolescence is commonly understood to be a time of rebellion. In popular

1950s films like Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), adolescents are depicted as angst-ridden, irrational, and even violent; yet this violence is framed as being driven by the even more irrational behavior of the parents, who fail to live up to the ideals of their off-spring. In cases such as these, the adolescent’s behavior is excused precisely because he or she understands what it means to be an American— that is, to be willing to break the rules on occasion in order to uphold a higher moral standard—and demands that his or her parents live up to the same standards.

The transition from metaphors of childhood to those of adolescence signals the way in which the state of the nation dictates how U.S. citizens imagine themselves. In the 1950s, the figure of the adolescent allowed U.S. citizens effectively to articulate the nation’s transition to a world power. This figure literally gave shape to the many anxieties attached to this transition, and allowed U.S. citizens to consider what it might mean to be an American in a global era. As Leerom Medovoi observes in his study of

1950s youth culture,

These [young rebel] figures emerged at the dawn of the Cold War era because the ideological production of the United States as leader of the “free world” required figures who could represent America’s emancipatory character, whether in relation to the Soviet Union, the new nations of the third world, or even its own suburbs. (1)

While Medovoi is correct when he argues that the adolescent figured prominently in

Cold War culture, the child did not immediately disappear as a result of the nation’s new status as a world leader. Rather, figures of childhood and adolescence would emerge at various moments when needed to depict varying issues relevant at the time. For example, when representing the “new nations of the third world” or racial minorities in the U.S., the figure of the child featured more prominently, precisely because people of color have historically been viewed as dependent and immature. The figure of the child also reemerges in times of crisis like the post-9/11 era as a way of representing the nation’s nostalgia for a more “innocent” time.

Even though childhood does not follow an easy developmental pattern that coincides with the nation’s maturity, I find the developmental metaphor useful as a way of thinking about the relationship between childhood and national identity. This is why I begin my title with the phrase, “growing up with America” rather than “growing up in

America.” I am less interested in the experience of real children in the United States— although these experiences do help to shape the figures that feature in my project— than in the development of child figures over the course of the U.S.’s ascendancy and decline as a world power. As the nation “grew up,” the child figures used to define and describe U.S. national identity also grew up in the sense that they became more complex and sophisticated. What might have begun as a racial stereotype of indigenous people, for example, developed into a means of sensitively portraying the multiple issues at stake in considering race in the United States. Even in moments where one might sense a regression, such as when children again come to dominate in literary

works after 9/11, child figures often display the authors’ understanding of the history of

U.S. imperialism and the role it has played in the nation’s development.9

In order to examine the role that childhood plays in the making and remaking of

U.S. national identity, I employ what can be identified as a “childhood studies approach.” While childhood studies emerged as early as the 1920s as a result of professional and other studies, including those conducted by such notable figures as G.

Stanley Hall and Havelock Ellis, I refer here to a very different history that begins specifically in the academic movement to study childhood. Anna Mae Duane sums up the thrust of the movement in her introduction to The Children’s Table (2013), the first comprehensive edited collection on the subject. Childhood studies, Duane maintains, seeks “to include the child in any field of study [by] realign[ing] the very structure of that field, changing the terms of inquiry and forcing a different set of questions” (1).

Childhood studies is still relatively new and, as a result, does not yet have a fixed identity. However, there are a few aspects that set it apart from, say, the related study of children’s literature. First and foremost, childhood studies is an interdisciplinary field that combines methods of research drawn from across the humanities and social sciences.

Childhood studies blends a humanistic and social scientific approach in order to better represent the complexity around the world of ideas regarding childhood, as well as the experiences of children living in each of these nations. Insofar as childhood studies is similar to American studies—in fact, many childhood studies scholars are employed by

American studies departments—it seeks to gain strength by broadly defining its method

9 See, for example, the progression that occurs in my chapter on the American Adam myth. In works such as Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995), for example, one can see how the young adolescents portrayed in these novels are subject to increasingly complex problems. Moreover, the character in Hogan’s novel is more fully fleshed out, allowing readers to see her as more than a conglomeration of stereotypes.

and scope. Additionally, by adding childhood to the metaphorical table of academic fields, childhood studies de-centers already established fields and, as Duane notes, shifts the conversation in a way that produces new findings on topics that might otherwise appear exhausted.

A similar decentering of an established field of study occurs in my project. While there is a wealth of scholarship on the Myth and Symbol school, especially critical pieces denouncing these scholars for ignoring race and gender, there has yet to be a comprehensive study of the role that childhood played in their work. I maintain that myth-symbol scholars like Henry Nash Smith, R.W.B. Lewis, and Perry Miller were in fact deeply engaged with questions of youth, and that cultural conceptions of childhood helped shape the myths that allowed them to answer their own questions regarding national identity. Furthermore, their “stories” about national identity inaugurated a chain of retellings that would continue to draw upon the figure of the child in order to rework national mythology in response to the changes in the contemporary dominant order. As

I mentioned earlier, myth draws upon powerful images, themes, and symbols in order to reinforce an existing order, or “state fantasy.” Because the U.S. changed profoundly during the period 1945-2011, the myths used to support the order changed as well.

Donald Pease succinctly sums up this process of change: “When a state fantasy’s structures of disavowal are either suspended or, in the case of the cold war, discontinued, what remained unacknowledged under the aegis of the state fantasy demands acknowledgement” (6). Stories where childhood and national identity intersect can also take on a more subversive role, and help begin the process of dismantling an existing order even while it is still in place. As with the flexible figure of “the child” in U.S.

culture, myth can also be reclaimed for a project of imagining alternatives to an existing order. In this case, myth is used to destabilize the existing order by revealing the flaws in it and the vision of U.S. culture it promotes.

By employing a childhood studies approach, it is possible to read changes in

American mythology and the ways it helped to either support or challenge the existing order. The three moments of prime importance for my study are the periods 1945-1989,

1989-2001 and 2001-2011. Those familiar with these dates will immediately recognize the first and the last as being marked by wars that took on a global dimension (i.e., the

Cold War and the “War on Terror”). The 1990s also included wars abroad, such as

“Operation Desert Storm,” but this period is far more interesting for its function as a transitional moment.10 It functions, in Donald Pease’s words, as a moment that “opened up spaces for reconfiguration of the social order” (35). The beliefs that dominated during the Cold War, especially a “them vs. us” mentality that excused undemocratic behavior, suddenly became the subject of extensive criticism. In novels of this period, authors return to the Cold War and critique the subjection of politically marginalized people, including American Indians and people of color in the Caribbean. The suburbs, too, are criticized with renewed zeal for their tendency to function as a restrictive space that demands conformity and erases racial, class, and ethnic issues by denying access to people that fall in these categories or hiding them behind white picket fences.

Those who grew up in the 1990s will understand the change that occurred in the

10 In Life Between Two Deaths, Phillip Wegner argues for a critical engagement with the 1990s, or the time between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the later fall of the Twin Towers in 2001. He writes that “to mark these kinds of endings and beginnings and to think in terms of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ necessitates as well that we rethink the 1990s…as a coherent culture period” (9). Thus, like other fellow Cold War scholars, Wegner makes a case for expanding the traditional timeframe of the Cold War in order to include later periods that place these earlier historical events into relief.

aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Suddenly, the enemy that the

U.S. had lost with the close of the Cold War reemerged in the guise of a Middle Eastern terrorist. In his September 20, 2001 speech, George W. Bush set the tone by declaring,

“Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” Bush goes on to describe the terrorist organization known as Al Qaeda and to demand that nations harboring this new enemy turn them over to the U.S. With speeches such as this one, the Cold War rhetoric of “them vs. us” reemerged. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were initiated in an effort to stop terrorism. Terrorists could be hiding anywhere, just as earlier in the Cold

War Communists could be hiding anywhere. Such rhetoric bred a new culture of fear that set in motion new revisions of American myths;11 some U.S. citizens embraced the new order, but many more resisted since they realized the danger inherent in this kind of rhetoric.

My reading of the Cold War as a much longer struggle that lasted well into the early 2000s builds upon the more recent work of post-1945 scholars. In the Oxford

Handbook of the Cold War (2013), an edited collection that challenges traditional readings of the Cold War as a struggle between two world powers, contributors insist that the Cold War is just one phase in a much longer movement of globalization, human

11 While the term “culture of fear” has perhaps been overused, it does have some distinct origins that make it useful in Cold War studies. See, for example, the edited collection, Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader (2009) and Between Fear and Freedom: Cultural Representations of the Cold War (2010). The first text give a more classic definition of “culture of fear,” in which a state resorts to political propaganda that instills fear within its citizens in order to control them. In contrast, Between Freedom and Fear considers how everyday objects emit political and ideological messages that support the state’s political agenda. In short, this second text demonstrates how the state maintains a culture of fear through the use of everyday objects (a book, a movie, a T-shirt).

rights, and decolonization, among others (Iriye 22). It is for this reason that the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, in Akira Iriye’s words, marks just one

“important chapter in an unfinished story” (27). The collection’s editors, Richard

Immerman and Petra Goedde, add that the 1990s and 2000s is “a history that needs to be taken into account as both a comment and counter-narrative to the dominant story of cold war confrontations” (8).

The Oxford Handbook is not the only one to suggest that the 1990s and early

2000s should be included in studies of the Cold War. Walter LaFeber makes a similar claim in America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-2006 (2006). LaFeber, a well-known historian of the Cold War, updated his landmark text to include the 1990s and early

2000s. In response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center,

LaFeber created a new Cold War narrative that traces the conclusion of earlier struggles between the U.S. and Russia in the Middle East, particularly in Afghanistan, to the present “War on Terror” initiated by George W. Bush. LaFeber remarks that in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks there were “eerie echoes of the early Cold War” (416): “A straight line runs from the U.S.-Soviet struggle in the 1980s over Afghanistan (see pp.

316, 345), to the tragedies in New York City and Washington” (405).

My own project, which revolves around narrative storytelling, would be incomplete without the inclusion of the final two important chapters in the Cold War narrative in terms of the two decades following the “end” of the Cold War. In this account of the Cold War, the Cold War proper (1945-1989) is only the beginning in a much longer effort to define U.S. national identity during a period of increased influence in international affairs. Those who attempted to author narratives that either supported

or challenged dominant beliefs about the U.S.’s mission as a world power helped to draw attention to the tensions that emerged from a single chapter in a larger narrative fraught with racial and gender issues. As the editors in the Oxford Handbook to the Cold

War write, the 1990s and the early 2000s do indeed represent a “history rich in alternative moments and milestones, rich also in exposing missed opportunities and failed efforts” (8). Authors in the 1990s, for example, responded to the flaws in Cold War policy (both domestic and foreign), and those in the early 2000s turned to the Cold War as a moment of comparison to present military engagements and the “New World

Order” that appeared to revive American exceptionalism. Most importantly, they did so with the help of a figure that most would consider voiceless, vulnerable, and incapable of enacting change: the child. By turning to the child figure, critics of Cold War policy attempted to give voice to the “metaphorical children,” especially women and minorities, that suffered during the Cold War proper in order to deconstruct national narratives that cast the child as a passive and obedient subject.

Chapter Overview

My study begins with a discussion of the origins of three Cold War myths: the virgin land, the errand into the wilderness, and the American Adam. My first chapter returns to the foundational work of Henry Nash Smith, R.W.B. Lewis, and Perry Miller, three of the “Founding Fathers” of American Studies. I argue that these founders drew upon cultural conceptions of childhood in order to refashion classic American myths during a time when American exceptionalism, or the belief in the United States’ unique status as a democracy with a divine mission, was coming into vogue. Many of the prominent critics of exceptionalism in the field, including Amy Kaplan and Donald

Pease, have addressed the destructive aspects of the myths that emerged out of what

is now labeled the “Myth and Symbol school.” Yet despite the wealth of this criticism, there has yet to be an extensive study regarding the relationship between Myth and

Symbol scholarship and childhood. A limited number of essays in prominent children’s literature journals such as The Lion and the Unicorn and Children’s Literature

Association Quarterly discuss the relevance of this work in children’s literature.12

Similarly, Americanists have attended to these myths—even considering the implications of them in works featuring children—yet they fail to consider the relationship between the character’s age and the myth itself.13 This first chapter is therefore intended to address the limits in current scholarship on the myths associated with the founders of American Studies.

My second chapter focuses on the literary response to the American Adam myth during the Cold War. Understanding the destructive aspects of myths that erased from

U.S. national narratives gender and racial conflict, authors responded with literary fiction that exposed the discrepancies in the mythology constructed by the Myth and Symbol school. I include a series of three case studies that complicate Lewis’s original definition of the American Adam by considering the difference gender and race make in the

American experience. These case studies—including novels intended for children and adults—imagine a young girl in the place of the American Adam. The American Eve is like her male predecessor in that she too is a model of self-reliance and appears to come from nowhere. However, unlike the American Adam, this female figure is haunted by her past and must come to terms with it in order to continue leading an independent

12 See, for example, Anastasia Ulanowicz’s “American Adam, American Cain: Johnny Tremain, Octavian Nothing, and the Fantasy of American Exceptionalism” (2011).

13 See, for example, T. Christine Jespersen’s “Unmapping Adventure: Sewing Resistance in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms” (2010).

life. Because the American Adam was often imagined as an explorer, these case studies touch upon the history of U.S. empire and explore the guilt associated with these exploits. The girls in each case are either Native American or those pretending to be Native American. These novels—Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960),

Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995), and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (2011)—thus seek to dispel the negative aspects of the original myth by restoring gender and race to the national narrative.

In the third chapter, I continue my discussion of race and gender in the context of the virgin land myth. My central argument here is that the adolescent girl became a go- to figure for novelists interested in critiquing the virgin land myth as a result of the popular interpretation of adolescence as a time of transition. As in nationally sanctioned narratives of U.S. expansion, the girls in these narratives are mythologized by male characters who are attracted by their beauty, and as a result, these girls frequently suffer emotional and physical abuse. The violence in these narratives serves as an illustration of the damaging effects of colonialism, and brings attention to the absence of empire in the reigning national narrative. I take as my case studies in this chapter

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993), and

Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves (2008), each of which challenge dominant narratives of U.S. expansion by underscoring the violence of the nation’s imperialistic agenda.

My fourth chapter begins with Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956).

Miller’s articulation of the Pilgrim’s “errand” is typically described in terms of father-son bonds. The Americans in Miller’s study follow their Pilgrim Fathers and wonder if they

are living up to their predecessor’s greatness. Authors concerned about the nation’s foreign policies during the Cold War also turned to father-son bonds as a way of questioning the nation’s errand. My case studies in this chapter—Meindert DeJong’s

The House of Sixty Fathers (1956), Russell Banks’ Rule of the Bone (1995), and

Sherman Alexie’s Flight (2007)—use the adoption trope in order to imagine new ties to foreign nations. This extends earlier uses of the trope in nineteenth-century American literature, where it was utilized as a way of imagining the U.S.’s break from England.

The consequences of the U.S.’s new position of global power are the subject of each of my case studies, and many are fraught with anxiety regarding U.S. intervention in foreign affairs.

My final chapter shifts from works produced in the U.S. in order to imagine the future of “America.” If, as I demonstrate in my former chapters, the child was integral to the articulation of national identity during the U.S.’s rise to global power, then what happens to this figure in a moment when this power is dwindling? What, for example, will this child look like when the U.S. finally becomes integrated into a global community? I use Taiwanese author Chang Ta-Chun’s Wild Child (1996) as a case study for exploring these questions. Chang is a renowned critic of Taiwanese culture, and his dual interests in childhood and Cold War politics makes his work an especially rich case study for my concerns. Chang demonstrates the effects of globalization on his child characters, clothing them in American imports that are ironically made in neighboring Asian countries. Chang’s satirical wit enables him to rethink the role childhood plays in the construction of American national identity in a world where

globalization cannot be ignored. Moreover, Chang’s self-reflexive analysis of the art of storytelling reveals the continued importance of myth in identity formation.

Conclusion

Questions regarding U.S. national identity have not fallen to the wayside in the aftermath of the Cold War. Rather, they have returned with a strength that proves that the simple question of “What does it mean to be an American?” is one that will continue to concern future generations. While it is uncertain how new answers to this familiar question will reshape U.S. identity, it is certain that childhood will continue to be a central part of the stories the nation tells about itself. As Caroline Levander suggests,

“the child tells an important story not only about how the United States emerged as a global force, but also about how it continues to endure in an increasingly postnational, global era” (28). The Cold War marked the beginning of this global consciousness, with the figure of the child firmly at the center of debates concerning U.S. national identity.

As the meaning of “America” is stretched beyond a national framework to encompass the global experiences that define life in the twenty-first century, the child once again becomes a central part of efforts to forge and reforge a national identity. For better or for worse, the figure of the child remains an integral part of U.S. storytelling practices.

CHAPTER 2 “DEPLOY THE CHILD!”: AMERICAN NATIONAL MYTHS IN THE EARLY COLD WAR

In the early Cold War, several leading scholars in the emerging field of American studies traded their military weapons for ideological ones. Recently home from the

Second World War battlefield, they hung up their uniforms and embarked on a mission to define, describe, and celebrate the United States. This new mission required tools that would capture the cultural climate during the post-war years, a climate that was largely dictated by the pressure to conform to traditional family values. Drawing from their literary toolkits, these soldier scholars turned to the figure of the child, one of the most enduring representations of the nation’s “innocence,” and of its hopes and dreams.

The figure of the child, in a situation rife with fear of the spread of Communism and the possibility of nuclear warfare, made it possible to trace the nation’s literary traditions, and in doing so to identify key features of the national character. Children, as those who deployed this figure understood, were associated not just with innocence, but also change. The etymological roots of the word “child” express this understanding of childhood. Deriving from the Old English cild, meaning “fetus, infant, unborn or newly born person,” and the Proto-Germanic kiltham, meaning “womb,” the word “child” represents a range of possibilities. It is a person in a state of becoming, with all of the possibilities associated with that moment of transformation and transition.

It was by way of these associations with childhood that these scholars also began to interpret their present moment. In a lengthy debate that revolved around the dialectic of innocence and experience, such notable literary critics as Leslie Fiedler,

Ihab Hassan, R.W.B. Lewis, and Henry May identified the centrality of innocence in U.S. national identity and considered the implications of what some referred to as the “cult of

youth” (Hassan 315). Fears about the future of America were articulated through landmark texts such as Fiedler’s An End to Innocence (1955), May’s The End of

American Innocence (1959), and Hassan’s Radical Innocence: Studies in the

Contemporary American Novel (1961). As the titles suggest, there was a sense that innocence was no longer possible in the present age, and that something terrifying was part of the nation’s future. The persistence of such titles led Jane Knowles and Robert

Allen Skotheim to announce the following in a 1961 review from American Quarterly:

Twin concerns, both with ascertaining prior American ‘innocence’ and with pointing out paths which lead “beyond innocence” suggest a coming-of- age of attitudes toward the American past and present which can be identified as an important segment of the contemporary scholarly climate of opinion. (94)

The participants in what I shall henceforth refer to as the “beyond innocence” debate attempted to come to terms with the nation’s frightening future, including the prospect that all history could be snuffed out with a single push of a button. Through the figure of the child, these scholars attempted to recapture the sense of possibility and hope associated with the nation’s beginnings, returning to the nation’s infancy. Some were more cynical, while others brimmed with optimism.

The scope of the beyond innocence debate extends even further than the meager documentation suggests, as evidenced in Knowles and Skotheim’s review.

Indeed, the turn to the figure of the child can be seen in the development of American studies, which originated in the 1920s and gained momentum in the 1940s after the establishment of Harvard University’s “History of American Civilization” program. The pioneers of American studies, including Perry Miller, Henry Nash Smith, and R.W.B.

Lewis, addressed the concerns of the post-World War II generation through the revival of several American national myths. These included the American Adam, the virgin

land, and the errand into the wilderness. Men of their times, Miller, Smith, and Lewis acknowledged that the United States was in a moment of transformation from childhood to the status of a mature world power. These men expressed the anxiety surrounding this transitional moment through the deployment of the figure of the child in their studies of the central “themes,” “myths,” “symbols,” and “images” that characterized U.S. culture. Miller, for example, depicted the Puritan errand as shot through with a tension between fathers and sons, an intergenerational struggle marked by failure and a sense of incompetence. Smith, on the other hand, was drawn more to the heroes of the past, and he often described them as young ruffians full of spirit and energy. Lewis, too, was an optimist, and identified several moments of renewal in American literature and history, although notably he did not extend the possibility for a re-birth to his own generation. What each of these men had in common was a desire to understand their present through an extensive study of the America of the past. In their work, the past and the present began to collide in the bodily form of the child.

This absence of any sustained scholarly attention to the central figure of the child is in part due to the marginalization of childhood studies in the humanities. Anna Mae

Duane points out in her introduction to The Children’s Table that scholars interested in childhood are often sentenced to the “children’s table,” or the little table set up for the younger dinner guests who are not yet mature enough to dine with the adults (1). The resistance to childhood studies in American studies is evident in the different responses to landmark essays published over the years in American Quarterly. As Sharon O’Brien writes in her commentary on R. Gordon Kelly’s “Literature and the Historian” (1974),1

Kelly’s essay “never attained the almost totemic stature of an article like Barbara

1 See Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline (1999) for O’Brien’s commentary.

Welter’s ‘The Cult of True Womanhood.’ Perhaps this is because the genre Kelly chose to explore—children’s literature—is of less interest to American studies scholars than women’s writing” (113). It is no wonder that childhood was seen as suspect with the publication of such scathing remarks as James F. Scott’s declaration: “I fear…[that there are] powerful social forces now active beneath the surface of American life, forces which glorify immaturity and thus obscure an essential distinction between adolescent spontaneity and adult creativity” (151).2 Scott’s comment attests to the assumption that childhood, or in this case adolescence, is a stage of life associated with immaturity, one that should not be returned to once passed through.

It is only with the increase of childhood studies in the early 2000s that

Americanists more generally have begun to take seriously the importance of the child.

This turn is evidenced in several recent book reviews in American Quarterly. Maude

Hines notes, “Critical interest in childhood has grown in American studies in the last few years.” New studies of childhood, Hines continues,

[follow] a trend in recent scholarship that looks at the child, along with its treatment and figuration, as a barometer of cultural pressures. […] These books help us to see the breadth of possibility for playing with the role of the child in American studies. (151)

Julia Mickenberg adds that “only relatively recently have works with children as their focus begun to gain the sustained attention of American studies scholars;” yet

Mickenberg insists that childhood studies should matter to those in American studies due to the child’s ability to “[provide] crucial insights into [the] core values and practices of our society, revealing how American culture reproduces itself in the younger generation” (1217). Most recently, Kristin Proehl asserts, “Recent scholarship in

2 Scott’s essay, “Beat Literature and the American Teen Cult,” appeared in American Quarterly in 1962.

childhood and adolescent studies…offers new insights into how the politicization of youth is, in fact, part of a broader American historical and cultural legacy” (172). The explicit focus on childhood in U.S. culture is testament to the centrality of childhood in the construction of national identity, the subject of many of the books discussed in these reviews.

While the attention childhood is now receiving is welcome, it does tend to skew the history of American studies. If, as I mentioned previously, we view the scholarship of several leading scholars in the field through a childhood studies lens, one will find that it was always already deeply concerned with childhood. In fact, it is not too much to say that the figure of the child was of central importance to these scholars’ mission to define, describe, and celebrate U.S. national identity. It is as if, returning from war, they all received an order to “deploy the child!” Still in military mode, they obeyed, and made incredible contributions to studies of childhood, even if they were not consciously attempting to do so (after all, the academic study of childhood would not develop until much later).3 What follows, then, is a brief overview of the historical factors that led to the beyond innocence debate, a conversation that frames the activities of the other leaders in American studies, most notably those from the Myth and Symbol school.

The Beyond Innocence Debate: A Brief Overview

During the 1950s, several factors contributed to the rise of the adolescent in

American fiction and literary criticism: teen culture was rapidly expanding, the launch of new mass publications challenged highbrow literature, and there existed a post-war

3 Much like the categories of gender and race, childhood was not considered a critical category of inquiry at the time. This is not to say that scholars did not think about these categories—even a cursory glance at popular Cold War scholarship would refute this claim—yet there was no formal support for such inquiry at the time. It was not until the 1970s, for example, that the study of childhood began to take shape through the field of children’s literature.

consensus about the decline of American innocence. The latter sparked the “beyond innocence” debate that began in the 1950s and continued into the early 1960s. Many scholars felt that America must forgo its previous fetishization of innocence if it was ever to mature. In re-examining this period, some scholars believe that war-time contact with the Old World was the spark that set scholars aflame. Most of these pioneering scholars were young men recently returned from the war, an experience that affected them to the extent that they began to challenge the worldviews of their older colleagues (Knowles and Skotheim 99). Scholars in the beyond innocence debate can be divided into two camps: those for and against the inclusion of the adolescent in American literature. Of those that participated in these debates, Ihab Hassan, for example, defended the adolescent most persistently and eloquently, whereas Leslie Fiedler presented the staunchest opposition. Fiedler’s criticism of innocence culminated in his 1965 classic,

Love and Death in the American Novel, where he insists that it is necessary to move

“beyond innocence” if American literature is ever to grow up.

Critics like Fiedler generally focused on the “bigger picture,” examining American literature as a whole and identifying literary strains responsible for its current state.

Others, however, limited their critiques to the visible changes in contemporary American fiction. The Beats, not surprisingly, took the brunt of the criticism, and were often deemed responsible for corrupting American literature. The Beats’ youthful exuberance and adolescent antics made them popular with a burgeoning youth culture, but also a prime target for anxious literary critics. An example of this criticism is to be found in

James F. Scott’s 1962 American Quarterly essay, “Beat Literature and the American

Teen Cult.” In the essay’s introduction, Scott remarks,

The Beat conception of the creative process, shot through with inconsistency and naiveté, is an indirect yet almost inevitable result of powerful social forces now active beneath the surface of American life, forces which glorify immaturity and thus obscure an essential distinction between adolescent spontaneity and adult creativity. (151)

Scott continues his tirade as he warns readers about the nation’s “overblown interest in adolescence” (152). Scott’s criticism reflects a subtle yet important change in the beyond innocence debate: by the early 1960s, critics were not only demanding a move beyond innocence, they were genuinely worried about the impact of teen culture on

American literature, a sentiment reflected in Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American

Novel (1965). The teen had therefore moved beyond serving as a symbol of the growing pains of twentieth-century writers and developed into the embodiment of the threat to further literary achievement.

The heightened anxiety and intensity of the backlash against the American teen that is reflected in Scott’s essay demonstrates the extent to which some critics felt threatened by youth culture. In Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity

(2005), Leerom Medovoi attributes some of this anxiety to the changes in the book market. The increase in paperback sales meant that librarians and other traditional bastions of literary culture were losing control over the tastes of Americans. Teens in particular embraced the mass market paperback. As the number of paperbacks marketed to teens increased, these youth quickly gained the power to choose for themselves what they deemed worthwhile reading. Medovoi notes that these changes had further ramifications for literary critics, who were equally concerned with the new book market trends: “Literary intellectuals…found themselves particularly anxious over what they perceived as a tendency toward literary conformity, driven by the paperback’s

massification of literature” (80). These concerns were fueled by the frequent “conflation of mass culture and youth culture” (81), both of which critics tended to view as “baby food” (82). Medovoi acknowledges that these critics’ fears were not entirely unwarranted. However, the backlash against mass market paperbacks, and the targeting of the adolescent in particular, were often exaggerated responses to new market trends (82).

The increased visibility of youth cultures in the 1950s is only part of the reason why participants in the beyond innocence debate turned anew to the figure of the adolescent. As the dialectic of innocence and experience suggests, the adolescent was a crucial transitional figure that promised adult maturity in the near future. Younger children, while still central to the argument, were associated more with the America of the past, an “innocent” America that no longer existed or, if it did, had little relevance for the war-shocked scholars participating in the beyond innocence debate. In his summary of the intellectual fascination with adolescence, Leerom Medovoi explains,

Medovoi stresses that the adolescent’s association with rebellion and freedom was ideologically useful in the political climate of the early Cold War; however, there were other factors that led to interest in this transitional figure. The adolescent captured the fears that the nation was stuck in a state of arrested development, trapped forever in the pimply, serotonin-ridden body of a teenager. Without some kind of decisive act, the nation might never realize its potential as the leader of the free world.

Such an overview might suggest that participants in the beyond innocence debate saw the adolescent only in a negative light; however, for many, the adolescent also embodied an “emancipatory character” (Medovoi 1). Ihab Hassan, one of the leaders of the debate, described the adolescent as a complex figure that deserves respect: “The cult of adolescence is not an accident in our time,” Hassan contends,

“Quite the contrary, its history reverts to some of the most basic impulses in American experience. Behind it lies what we used to call the American Dream, the vision of youth, hope and the open road” (313). In the most revealing comment in his essay, “The Idea of Adolescence in American Fiction” (1958), Hassan returns to the dialectic of innocence and experience, explaining how the adolescent fits in it:

What went wrong with the American Dream, we all seem to be on the verge of asking, and our novelists, perhaps looking back to their own boyhood, write as if the adolescent knew the answer. And perhaps they are right. The adolescent is no longer simple or ignorant since Innocence has come to be rejected in the favor of Experience, and the pursuit of happiness has made way for the greater elegance of damnation. (318)

Hassan’s commentary may seem cynical today, but in its own context, it expressed an enormous optimism about the potential of the adolescent to open up spaces for discussion of the fears and anxieties of the current age.

Hassan’s optimism can be constructively compared to the attitudes of other participants in the debate, including Leslie Fiedler and Henry May. Both Fiedler and

May believed that the time of innocence was over, and that it was necessary to move

“beyond innocence” if America was to survive in the second-half of the twentieth century. In the conclusion to The End of American Innocence (1959), May remarks,

The end of American innocence was part of a great tragedy, but it was not, in itself, an unmitigated disaster. Those who look at it with dismay, or those who deny that it happened, do so because they expect true stories

to have a completely happy ending. This is a kind of innocence American history must get over. (398)

May’s assertion that scholars of American history “must get over” a myth of innocence predicated on “happy ending[s]” is rooted in his belief that this fiction of innocence is reductive and counterproductive. May defines innocence as “the absence of guilt and doubt and the complexity that goes with them” (393). Innocence, in May’s conception, simply cannot persist because it will leave Americans in a perpetual state of naivety.

Fiedler joins the choir championing a move beyond innocence in his similarly titled work, An End to Innocence, a collection of essays that features his “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” as its crowning achievement. While this essay previews some of Fiedler’s concerns about the immaturity of American literature, it is actually in

“Adolescence and Maturity in the American Novel” where he proclaims that the

American writer is an adolescent who “seeks a way toward maturity” (209). Trapped in a state of boyish innocence, these writers strive to reach the maturity that Fiedler associates with Europe. Fiedler’s description of the 1950s literary scene revives the Old

World/New World divide, positioning those writers in the New World as innocents.

Even for the more critical scholars, the adolescent remains a valuable figure, as he/she enables them to frame the cultural tensions of the 1950s in terms of a coming of age story. Both Fiedler and May, despite their criticisms of innocence, are good examples of this use of the figure. In rejecting innocence, Fiedler and May both reach towards what they consider the “complexity” of maturity, or the “guilt and [the] doubt” characteristic of adulthood (May 393). One cannot help but think of the most iconic teenager of American young adult fiction, Holden Caulfield, who embraces these very emotions. Adolescent angst and the brooding cynical attitude of teen icons like Caulfield

embody the values that advocates of an America beyond innocence embraced. Pamela

Hunt Steinle notes that the cultural power of adolescent figures like Caulfield stemmed from their ability to inspire the reader’s confidence in their ability to mature in the near distant future (155). Steinle’s explanation is useful, as it locates the adolescent’s power in his/her ability to transform into a fully-fledged adult. Poised between innocence and experience, the adolescent has attributes associated with both of these states, and therefore has all of the potential, for either success or failure, that literary critics associated with Cold War America in terms of both its cultural and political power.

The issues and concerns that led to the beyond innocence debate display how the figure of the child, especially child figures on the verge of adulthood, became central to the expression of post-war anxiety about the U.S.’s transition to a world power. Those identified as beyond innocence participants are not fully responsible for the deployment of the figure of the child at this pivotal moment, however. In order to grasp the depth of the reliance on child figures in the Cold War moment, it is necessary to turn our attention to the Myth and Symbol school. Proponents of this approach, which included

Perry Miller, Henry Nash Smith, and R.W.B. Lewis, turned to myth as a way of defining, describing, and celebrating U.S. national identity. The Myth and Symbol school should not be seen as separate from the beyond innocence debate. Indeed, some of its members, such as R.W.B. Lewis, were affiliated with both groups. Lewis was deeply invested in the theme of American innocence and feared its loss, even as he advocated for a myth and symbol approach to American culture. Myth, for Lewis, was a method for approaching the topic of American innocence and experience, a more effective way to analyze the dialectic that fascinated many of the leading critics of the time. The beyond

innocence debate and the Myth and Symbol school were like two pieces of a puzzle: the

Myth and Symbol approach provided the tools necessary to analyze the state of

America as it teetered between innocence and experience.

While not all of the proponents of the Myth and Symbol approach shared Lewis’s fascination with innocence, there is sufficient evidence to suggest that many were equally concerned with the changes in American culture that were central to the debate.

Myth and Symbol scholars recognized their moment as one of transition: America, it seemed to them, was at the end of one age and the beginning of another. In order to prepare for the challenges that Americans faced, these scholars turned to the figure of the child. The child helped them structure the messy history of the United States, and work through their own anxieties about the present age. For example, in the conclusion to The American Adam Lewis writes,

We have had to get beyond such simple-minded adolescent confidence, we suppose; we may even have got beyond the agonizing disillusion that unexamined confidence begets; and we sometimes congratulate ourselves austerely for having settled, like adults or Europeans, upon a course of prolonged tolerable hopelessness. (195)

Miller, too, dwells on adolescence, in this case his own, in the preface to Errand into the

Wilderness:

These papers, along with three or four books, are all I have yet been able to realize of a determination conceived three decades ago at Matadi on the banks of the Congo. I came there seeking “adventure,” jealous of the older contemporaries to whom that boon had been offered by the First World War. (vii)

Youth, and particularly male youth, offer these scholars a means to frame their larger concerns about the United States’ movement into a position of global dominance. Such a shift, Lewis indicates, requires “settling” into adulthood, a fact that Miller seems to support in his own narrative when he nostalgically describes his boyhood: these are

days to be remembered, he suggests, not ones to be returned to altogether.

While these two cases support a move towards a more “adult” America, the narrative structure indicates the necessity still of a vigorous youthful character. The child figure provides a useful contrast to the shaky maturity that Lewis and Miller identify in the present. Such a figure helped to give bodily form to the anxieties expressed by the

Myth and Symbol school and other literary critics who were bound together by a shared feeling that the nation must move beyond innocence. Figures at different stages of development, especially the child as the embodiment of the American past and the adolescent as the present, began to populate the literary criticism of the early Cold War and continued into the 1960s. I offer close readings of three landmark studies from the early Cold War: R.W.B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin

Land (1950), and Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956). My readings bear out the real value of thinking about earlier scholarship in American studies through a childhood studies lens. Even though studies explicitly devoted to childhood may be a more recent phenomenon, childhood has and continues to be central to the development of U.S. national identity. This is something that the early leaders of the

American studies movement seemed to understand. The long-standing division between “adult-” and “child-” centered studies risk losing important elements of

American intellectual history.

For the Love of Innocence: R.W.B. Lewis and the American Adam

When R.W.B. Lewis returned from the Second World War and resumed his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, he turned his attention to the task of re- defining U.S. national identity through a survey of nineteenth-century American literature. A newcomer to American literature, Lewis’s war experience had led him to

contemplate the American experience and contrast the nation’s past with its current state. Like many of the participants in the beyond innocence debate, Lewis’s experience of war-torn Europe reinvigorated his love of country, prompting him to return to the question of “What does it mean to be an American?” Lewis touchingly refers to his conversion to American literature in the preface to Literary Reflections (1993):

My immersion in American literature began in the spring of 1945, during the last months of the war, in an apartment in Florence commandeered for my small mobile intelligence unit. It was there that I happened upon a copy of Moby Dick in an Armed Forces edition and read it right through. The experience was overwhelming…and culturally speaking it turned me completely around. The impact of the quintessentially American book in that Tuscan-European environment led me to wonder for the first time about the phenomenon of being an American, about American habits of speech and behavior as contrasted with the European varieties, about American literature and its own characteristics and traditions. (xvi)

Lewis’s encounter with Melville’s masterpiece is presented as on par with a religious conversion, his whole world literally “turned around” by the novel’s vision of the clash of the New and Old Worlds. This clash was experienced by many of Lewis’s peers, and it was this defining historical moment that prompted them to search for the basis of a renewed national identity in the literature of the past.

Lewis’s interest in the clash between the Old and the New World led him to a study of the American Adam myth, the subject of his dissertation and first book. The

American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955) at once positioned Lewis as a participant in the beyond innocence debate and a Myth and

Symbol scholar. In his preface, Lewis describes the American Adam as “a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history” (1). The

American Adam, according to Lewis, was an “image contrived to embody the most fruitful ideas” (1). This definition of the American Adam as “image” recalls Carolyn

Steedman’s definition of the figure “used for the purposes of personification, to give a name and a face (and a body…) to abstract ideas and bodies of theory” (19). Despite

Lewis’s understanding of the American Adam as a literary figure, he was still deeply invested in its mythical aspects. I earlier pointed out that myth is a form of storytelling with the power to help the storyteller understand cultural experiences. For Lewis, this is exactly the way the American Adam functioned in the nineteenth century. In fact, Lewis even refers to the term “story” in his definition of myth, explaining that “The American myth, unlike the Roman, was not fashioned ultimately by a single man of genius. It was and it has remained a collective affair” (4). Myth is a form of storytelling, a “narrative [art that] deals with experiences” (3). Lewis perceived myth as a way to piece together the various conversations concerning innocence and experience during the nineteenth century, a project that was a valuable means to unraveling the contradictions inherent in

Lewis’s own age. For Lewis, the loss of innocence from this dialectic was disastrous; it produced an “age of hopelessness,” where new authors failed to create new works of art because they lacked inspiration (10).

Lewis’s disillusionment with the constraints of modern life echoes the concerns of his fellow participants in the beyond innocence debates. Indeed, much of Lewis’s project is an attempt to return to an imagined period of enlightenment and literary prosperity—the American Renaissance—in order to inject some life into what he perceives to be a languishing national literature. The literature of the twentieth century,

Lewis bemoans, “stand[s] in need of more stirring impulsions, of greater perspectives and more penetrating controversies” (10). With this claim, Lewis opens up a discussion of the “great intellects” of the American Renaissance, names made familiar through the

efforts of American studies’ founding fathers, Vernon Parrington and F.O. Matthiessen.

Recognizable figures such as Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson all enter into the discussion alongside theologians, politicians, and physicians of the day.

Lewis’s interpretation of these men’s work reveals an obsession with youth, and particularly youth as it is conventionally understood: children, that is, are perceived as innocent and adolescents are perceived as experienced.

Lewis’s primary contribution to these discussions consists, on the one hand, of reviving the American Adam myth, and, on the other hand, of bringing attention to the youthful aspects of the figure. While all of the myth-symbol scholars were interested to varying degrees in childhood and adolescence, Lewis is more upfront about his dependence on the cultural conceptions associated with these two stages of life. For instance, rather than hide the nineteenth-century fascination with childhood, Lewis embraces it—indeed, he calls attention to it on several occasions. One of the more notable references is to be found in Lewis’s description of Henry Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond. Lewis likens Thoreau’s experiences to a search for renewal in the folds of nature:

What he [Thoreau] was demanding was that individuals start life all over again, and that in the new world a fresh start was literally and immediately possible to anyone wide enough awake to attempt it. It was in this way that the experience could also appear as a return to childhood, to the scenes and wonder of that time. (26)

Lewis returns again to the themes of renewal and embrace of “childlike wonder” in his analysis of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The poet, Lewis insists, manages to take

Thoreau’s observation of the child’s unique perceptive abilities and thereby become that

child (50). No longer encumbered by the constraints of adult perception, Whitman

“begins after [the] recovery” that Thoreau so forcefully insisted upon.4

Lewis’s presentation of the return to childhood is more than an exercise in literary analysis; it is an urgent call to his readers. Lewis wants readers to return to these prior moments in literary history in order to better grasp “the dangers of innocence.” The fact that Lewis decides to use this as the name for the first section of his study indicates that the delightful promise of renewal that Thoreau insists is available to anyone “wide enough awake to attempt it,” and that it seems Whitman actually achieves, is no longer viable for contemporary Americans.

In fact, Lewis’s study attempts to convince readers that not only is innocence no longer useful, but that experience is the preferable option anyway. The catch is that

Lewis must strike a balance between the two, so that his ideal American enters maturity with just the right traces of innocence remaining from childhood days. Lewis’s concern with balancing innocence and experience aligns him with the beyond innocence approach, and he is indeed the only prominent Myth and Symbol scholar to receive recognition as a contributor to the debate.5

Lewis’s efforts in this respect are most evident in his descriptions of the American

Adam variants that appeared during the nineteenth century. These range from the prelapsarian innocence of Whitman’s Adam to the postlapsarian experience of

Melville’s. The Adams are described in turn as spunky youths able to survive on their

4 Lewis observes that Whitman “begins after that recovery, as a child, seeming self-propagated, and he is always going forth” (50). As he explains in the full passage, Whitman has made the complete transformation to the child-like state that Thoreau’s idealizes and desires. It is this “recovery” of childhood that Lewis suggests is the key difference between Whitman and his literary predecessor.

5 See, for example, Leerom Medovoi’s Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (2005) and Pamela Hunt Steinle’s In Cold Fear: The Catcher in the Rye Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character (2000).

own, relying solely on their own strength and intellect. Whitman’s Adam, for instance, is

“liberated, innocent, solitary, [with a] forward-thrusting personality” (28). Lewis considers

Whitman’s Adam to be the “fullest portrayal of the new world’s representative man as a new, American Adam” (28), and so he goes to great lengths to profile this figure, constructing long catalogues that rival those in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. One of these catalogues bears citing in full, for it is not only representative of Lewis’s style in this section but also of the underlying rhetoric of his entire project:

There, in fact, is the new Adam. If we want a profile of him, we could start with the adjectives that Whitman supplies: amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary; especially unitary, and certainly very easily amused; too complacent, we frequently feel, but always compassionate— expressing the old divine passion for every sparrow that falls, every criminal and prostitute and hopeless invalid, every victim of violence or misfortune. With Walt Whitman’s help, we could pile up further attributes, and the exhaustive portrait of Adam would be composed of a careful gloss on each one of them: hankering, gross, mystical, nude; turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding; no sentimentalist, no stander above men and women; no more modest than immodest; wearing his hat as he pleases indoors and out; never skulking or ducking or deprecating; adoring himself and adoring his comrades; afoot with his vision […]. (47)

Lewis’s catalogue begins with characteristics that might easily apply to an innocent youth, but then takes a striking turn in its second-half, where suddenly the new Adam becomes “fleshy, sensual…breeding.” These adjectives contrast sharply with the previous ones, which seem more applicable to a happy-go-lucky youth. In this way,

Lewis effectively combines characteristics that readers might associate with innocence with those of experience or maturity. In the short space of his catalogue, Lewis manages to compress the growing up process, so that by the end the new Adam is no longer a child but a mature male.

Despite the fact that Lewis is still concerned with those nineteenth-century intellectuals who favored innocence, he gently directs his reader towards the more

preferable state of experience, effectively blending the characteristics of the two states.

In so doing, he embodies Cold War sentiment about the position of America in the postwar period. As both Leerom Medovoi and Pamela Hunt Steinle argue, the adolescent figure was exceptionally powerful in this early stage of the nation’s rise to a new global prominence precisely because it represented a transitional state. Moreover, in Medovoi’s opinion, the fact that the adolescent has an “emancipatory character,” or a tendency to be associated with revolution, also enabled such a figure to capture some of the most beloved values of the nation—most notably through myths of the nation’s founding during the American Revolution (1). Steinle similarly argues that Lewis was attracted to the adolescent figure precisely because this figure is in the process of coming of age. The fact that the adolescent is nearing adulthood suggests that full maturity will ultimately be reached (Steinle 155). Since the emphasis in the early Cold

War, especially for those adhering to the beyond innocence position, was on moving towards cultural maturity, it is understandable why they might turn to a figure that captured the desire for the nation to “grow up.” Lewis weighed in on this debate by also stressing the importance of maturity. Like many of his peers, including Fiedler and

Henry May, Lewis believed that remaining in a state of innocence would ultimately hinder the nation’s progress. While innocence was integral to Lewis’s presentation of

American history, he found ways to stage the growing up process that he felt was necessary for the nation’s survival.

Lewis’s preference for experience is again evident in his section on the

“Fortunate Fall.” Lewis defines the fall as a process whereby the hero loses his innocence and is propelled into a state of experience that is more conducive to his

survival—in short, the hero is forced to grow up for his own good. In the section on the fortunate fall, Melville’s Adamic figure, like Whitman’s, is representative of the group, and Lewis provides his readers with yet another extensive profile:

The ritualistic trials of the young innocent, liberated from family and social history or bereft of them; advancing hopefully into a complex world he knows not of; radically affecting that world and radically affected by it; defeated, perhaps even destroyed—in various versions of the recurring anecdote hanged, beaten, shot, betrayed, abandoned—but leaving his mark upon the world, and a sign in which conquest may later become possible for survivors. (127-128)

The young hero faced with all these trials might very well go “mad with disillusion” (138).

He is an outsider, Lewis asserts, but one who is distinct from his European predecessors, whom he refers to as “the dispossessed, the superfluous, the alienated, the exiled” (128). This Adamic figure is a redeemer of the likes of Billy Budd, a Christ- like figure who is hanged for a crime he did not commit (but who, under the pressures of interrogation, commits one act of violence that seems to prove his guilt). The innocent is therefore thrust into a world filled with sin, one that in the end touches him but which he is able to touch as well through his sacrifice. Lewis effectively sketches for his reader the results of Adam in exile, the bleak and tumultuous events that occur after he has left the shelter of Eden and the state of innocence that it embodies.

The juxtaposition of innocence and experience here is striking, and Lewis once again incorporates language that is intended to remind his readers of childhood. The

“young innocent…advancing hopefully into a world he knows not of,” who ultimately faces extreme hardships at the hands of experienced adults, is literally beaten (or hanged, or shot, or betrayed, or abandoned) into maturity. As in the case of the nation as a whole, Lewis insists he must grow up if he is to survive in the world outside of the shelter of the Garden (129). The juxtaposition here might very well derive from William

Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, a collection of poems where children are first sheltered in the warmth and safety of home only later to be exposed to the hardships of the world. Blake’s poems occasionally blur the boundaries between innocence and experience, as in the case of “The Chimney Sweeper.” Abandoned in a world where “That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack, / Were all of them locked up in coffins of black,” the boy must navigate a world that is harsh and unforgiving with only the promise of redemption through God’s grace. Nor does the infant’s world in “Cradle Song” seem completely safe, as his mother “weeps” over him with tears that might represent joy or sorrow.

For Americans struggling with their identity in the postwar period, this comparison was particularly relevant. Despite the fact that the nation was rapidly increasing its global influence, there was still a fondness for a prewar state that many associated with a time of innocence. While this feeling was not particular to the post-World War II period, it did provide discussions of innocence with a force that they might not otherwise carry. By turning to the figure of the adolescent, Lewis effectively captured the mixed feelings of the postwar nation. On the one hand, this figure is still young enough to lack full knowledge of the world around him. In essence, he retains some of the elements of innocence that are traditionally associated with childhood. On the other hand, the adolescent has grown up enough to experience some hardship and have a hard won sense of the difficulties of life. He has captured a glimpse of what lies ahead. As Lewis balances in his text discussions of innocence and experience, he addresses the reader directly, stressing that the fall from innocence is imperative as America needs to be thrust into cultural maturity.

Growing Down: Henry Nash Smith and the Man Turned Boy Hero

While Lewis was actually one of the younger Myth and Symbol scholars, his investment in innocence and the way this investment played out in The American Adam is useful, as it demonstrates how Cold War interpretations of American national myths began to draw upon the attributes of children. The transformation of these once adult figures into children, despite many literary critics’ insistence that America must “grow up,” is evidence of a “growing down” trend in American literary criticism. By “growing down” I do not mean to suggest that the scholarship of Myth and Symbol scholars became less serious or complex; quite the contrary, they consistently acknowledged the numerous challenges and difficulties of growing up. In their efforts to define U.S. national identity, many Myth and Symbol scholars turned to the adolescent in order to capture the tensions between the desire to remain “innocent” and the pressure to grow up and mature. The Myth and Symbol scholars, as Lewis’s work so effectively demonstrates, understood the essential role that innocence played in U.S. national identity. No matter how they might feel about their present age, they did not abandon innocence in their efforts to understand the way that historical events like the Cold War were changing their nation’s values and traditions.

This is true even for scholars that do not fit as neatly into the larger debate about innocence and experience. Henry Nash Smith, a founder of American studies due to his pivotal role in the formation of the American Studies Association, is one of the Myth and

Symbol scholars that many fail to associate with the “beyond innocence” debate.6

Certainly, his landmark study, Virgin Land, is never read in relation to childhood. Critics of Smith’s Virgin Land often speak about his lack of attention to the role of women and

6 It is worth noting that Henry May dedicated The End of American Innocence to Henry Nash Smith.

Native Americans in the history of westward expansion.7 While these critiques have brought much-needed attention to the shortcomings in Smith’s work, they continue to overlook the importance of childhood in Virgin Land. The centrality of childhood in Virgin

Land not only links Smith to others more explicitly associated with the beyond innocence position, it also demonstrates that childhood was central to the reformulation during the Cold War of classic national myths.

Smith’s path differs dramatically from his contemporaries. A conscientious objector, Smith did not participate in the Second World War, and as such his views of country were not influenced by contact with the Old World. Smith cultivated a deep fondness for the American West, an interest that developed out of his experiences both as a young man and eventually as a professor. A native Texan, Smith had a personal interest in advancing scholarship on the West. Smith began his studies at Southern

Methodist University (SMU). Graduating at the age of eighteen, he returned to SMU as an instructor after a year of graduate work at Harvard University. Smith soon became the co-editor of the Southwest Review, inaugurating an intense period of his life that he likened to “a sort of super-graduate seminar” (qtd. in Bridgman). In 1937, Smith left

SMU to continue his graduate studies at Harvard. He would return there briefly after graduation in 1940, but soon departed for a position at the University of Texas. Smith’s time in the Texan university system, and especially his editorship of Southwest Review, helped to define his identity as a regional scholar. Richard Bridgman notes that the early years of Smith’s career set the tone for his later professional pursuits:

7 See, for example, Ann Fabian’s 1966 review of Virgin Land. Smith joined in the criticism in a 1986 review of Virgin Land, “Symbol and Idea in Virgin Land.” While Smith does not attempt to excuse himself for the oversights in his original study of the West, he claims that the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis shaped his vision of Western expansion in negative ways (28).

Questions of identity were central in the Southwest at that time. Like Americans in general, perpetually trying to separate their authentic elements from patterns inherited from abroad, the Texan was cultivating an awareness of his immediate environment without cutting himself off from the larger world. (3)

While beginning as a regional concern, Smith’s interest in identity developed to the point that he tackled these questions from a national perspective alongside contemporaries such as R.W.B. Lewis.8

Smith’s ambitious project attempts to understand the importance of the West for the nation’s identity. Like many of his peers, Smith found in the American West a stage wide enough to encompass a wide variety of characters. He was interested primarily in recovering some of the popular forms such as dime novels that were left out of earlier studies of American literature. In the process, Smith took the characters that populated his narrative, primarily rugged Western heroes like Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, and transformed these men into rowdy boys. His heroes were mischievous, to be sure, but they also had just a touch of innocence, enough to allow others to overlook their adolescent antics. Smith explains his heroes’ child-like qualities by describing the early stages of westward expansion. Young Americans imagined numerous possibilities as they began populating the land in the West. The new belief in manifest destiny was backed by an understanding that “America must turn away from the feudal past of

Europe to build a new order founded upon nature” (44). In order to do so, it was necessary to have a guide, someone capable of crossing the terrain and surviving in isolated areas. These guides populated early American literature, primarily in the form of rugged mountaineers. Figures like Natty Bumppo, Daniel Boone, and Kit Carson

8 For more on Smith’s early career, see Henry F. May’s biography, “The Rough Road to Virgin Land” (1989).

dominated the American imagination during this period of expansionism. Celebrated for their ability to understand nature, these men received both praise and criticism for their decision to separate from civilization. Smith explains that their separation enabled these

Western heroes to purify themselves and attain some of the qualities associated with childhood, most notably innocence. These heroes, especially those capable of navigating difficult terrain, encouraged other Americans to set out West in search of better prospects.

Having populated the new lands in the West, Americans began considering what they could do with this immense natural resource. In order to spur production and entice others to travel westward, a new image of the West as the “garden of the world” was needed. This is the period where the yeoman became idealized, since it was he who was most capable of cultivating the “virgin land.” The cultivation of lands promised to bring wealth to the new nation, and the image of the garden suggested a never-ending constantly renewable resource. Gardens, as Annette Kolodny notes, were traditionally a feminine space, a place of order and culture (The Land Before Her xiii). The garden thus conflicted with previous views of the land as a natural source of bounty, since it now required cultivation in order to be fruitful. Smith cites Cooper as one of the first to articulate this conflict in a passage from one of his Leatherstocking Tales. Smith describes a passage in The Prairie (1827) where Leatherstocking encounters Ishmael

Bush, a character embodying a reckless approach to nature: “Whereas Leatherstocking has a natural virtue and an exotic splendor derived from his communion with untouched nature, Bush and his sons are at war with nature. They are the very axeman from whom

Leatherstocking has fled halfway across the continent” (220). Smith thus discovers in

Cooper the irreparable conflict between the nation’s desire to develop into a formidable empire and a longing for the simplicity of life in the rugged American West.

The conflicting images of the American West as a wild land of lush beauty and an unkempt plot of land in need of cultivation aligns Smith with fellow contemporaries such as Lewis who were also interested in the dialectic between innocence and experience.

In Smith’s project, the “wilderness” is associated with a primeval innocent state, like

Lewis’s Adam before the Fall. Later descriptions of the West as the “garden of the world” perpetuated the myth of the American West as space of innocence and purity, separate from the corruption that made its way to the cities and towns of the Northeast.

Unlike Lewis, Smith was not explicitly concerned with innocence, and his project lacks direct references to the role innocence played in nineteenth-century American culture.

However, Smith returns to the dialectic of innocence and experience in order to describe the complexity of U.S. culture during a time when the nation was rapidly expanding its borders and increasing its wealth and power. Given the Cold War climate at the time, it is easy to imagine that the longing for an “innocent” America would strike a chord with Smith. Despite the fact that Smith never saw the battlefield, he still understood the impact of the Second World War on the United States. Like the earlier

America of his study, the U.S. was again at a crossroads, faced with the decision either to cling to the past and the innocence that it represented, or to step forward into

“adulthood” and the inevitable corruption that accompanied it.

While Smith fails to exploit the connection between America and childhood innocence as directly as Lewis, he continually returns to Romantic ideals typically associated with the child. Smith cultivates this relationship in underscoring the nation’s

deep reverence for nature: “Beyond, occupying the overwhelming geographical mass of the continent, lay the West, a realm where nature loomed larger than civilization and where feudalism had never been established. There, evidently would grow up the truly

American society of the future” (45). Nature becomes the key to the nation’s rebirth as an innocent, free from the sins of the Old World. Smith finds the optimism of men of letters such as Walt Whitman particularly moving. He cites multiple passages of

Whitman’s poetry, all of which depict the American pioneer as a young child. For instance, in “Passage to India” (1871) Whitman writes of the “myriad progeny of Adam and Eve moving westward around the globe” (47). Whitman’s Adam and Eve are

“wandering, yearning, curious…with questionings, baffled, formless, feverish—with never-happy hearts….” (qtd. in Smith 47). While critics including Samuel Turner suggest that Smith misrepresents “Passage to India,”9 the fact that Smith finds in it the extended metaphor that he will continue to use to depict the nation’s errand into the wilderness remains critical for understanding the underlying structure of Virgin Land.

This metaphor depends on the child as a way of grasping American empire. In

Smith’s account, the virgin land is what nurses the young empire to maturity, providing the resources necessary to cultivate a thriving economy. Early pioneers lured out West by the seductive image of the “garden of the world” believed that the lands would not only provide sustenance but also a home to call their own. Jefferson’s agrarian policies asserted that men should be allowed to till their own soil, and this ultimately led to the institution of the Homestead Act. Smith’s interest in nature, especially the image of the

9 In a hypertext version of Virgin Land produced through the University of Virginia’s American Studies program, Turner argues that Whitman’s poetry should not be read literally since the poet was well-known for adopting various personas. He cites Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America (1982) as one possible counter-narrative to Smith’s reading of Whitman’s conception of the Western frontier in poems such as “Passage to India.”

garden, represents the young nation’s desire to return to a state of innocence. In his famous study of the Golden Age of children’s literature, Humphrey Carpenter suggests that utopian spaces such as the garden lost supporters as changing historical circumstances made it evident that such spaces were no longer viable.10 However, in early America these possibilities appeared endless. The American garden, unlike that of young Mary Lennox, was not found in a state of disrepair, but rather in its original natural beauty.

Smith continues to address the nation’s desire for innocence though a bevy of mythical figures drawn from American popular fiction, each of which contributed to the view of the nation as a child. Beginning with Daniel Boone Smith explores the association of the Western hero with nature. Smith describes Boone as “happy, innocent, and benevolent; simple, not savage,” a description that applies to Cooper’s

Leatherstocking as well (55). Leatherstocking is a “child of the forest” who prefers the wide-open spaces to the restrictions of civilized society. The bond with nature that

Boone, Leatherstocking, and later Western heroes share depends on their isolation from society. While this isolation is a mark of purity, it also limits the role of early

Western heroes, who were unsuitable for the romantic tales popular at the time. Chaste and incapable of romantic love, Leatherstocking thus fails to mature. Fiedler explores the cause for the romantic failings of Cooper’s hero, situating the old mountaineer in the

10 Golden Age writers such as Lewis Carroll were openly suspicious of the beauty of the garden. In Alice in Wonderland (1865), Alice travels through Wonderland in order to enter the garden only to discover that it is a place of danger, ruled by an insane Queen and an incompetent King. Other iterations of the garden include Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883). In this adventure story, young Jim Hawkins discovers that Treasure Island is not a luscious garden but rather a barren wasteland. As more Americans settled out West, they too would discover that the garden of the world was not always so hospitable.

tradition of American literature which he calls “boys’ books” (Love and Death 209).11

Smith provides another answer, arguing that Cooper’s consideration of class conflict forbid him from finding Leatherstocking a mate. Whatever the case may be,

Leatherstocking’s sexual purity contributes to his unbroken relationship with nature.12

As the case of Leatherstocking demonstrates, attitudes towards nature helped shape the Western hero. These heroes, according to Smith, were “presented as children of the ancient mother nature” (73). In Smith’s account future heroes become younger and younger, and thus have a striking similarity to Lewis’s American Adam.

More than once, Smith describes these heroes as “young and handsome.” Later heroes such as Buffalo Bill and Kit Carson lacked the spiritual connection with nature, but made up for it with their inner sense of moral character and reckless disregard for the rules.

These men were the good bad boys popularized in boys’ books such as Thomas Bailey

Aldrich’s Story of a Bad Boy (1869) and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn (1876). Remaining boys at heart, Western heroes were “light-hearted, fearless, generous, and ‘noble in their treatment of a friend or a fallen foe’” (111).13 They used their intellect and strength to battle the natural surroundings—a prairie fire might be taken just a seriously as an Indian in the dime novels featuring these denizens of the

11 In Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Fiedler argues that James Fenimore Cooper initiated the “boyish theme” in American literature: “It is Cooper who first dreams the American version of this [boyish] theme, converting a peripheral European archetype into the central myth of our culture. The consignment of his work, then, to the world of children is not, in a child-centered world, a sign of failure but of success; and precisely because he is the first writer in the United States of boys’ books, he is the first truly American writer to have appeared” (182). Perhaps without realizing it, Fiedler makes a strong case for studying children’s literature alongside literature for adults.

12 As Annette Kolodny notes, nature serves as Leatherstocking’s mistress (The Lay of the Land 111). 13 This definition sounds strikingly similar to the one provided by Gillian Avery in her study of American children’s literature. In her chapter on boys’ books, Avery writes, “Even Peck’s Bad Boy, crude and spiteful as he seems to the modern reader, will fight to protect a smaller boy or a schoolgirl. There is no malice in the idealized Bad Boy; it is just that he is born to trouble, and he is resigned to the fact that the cards are stacked against him” (199).

Wild West. Smith notes that the dime novel distinguished between the domesticated space of the Middle Interior and the Far West—the latter being designated as the “Wild

West.” The Wild West continued to remain a suitable imaginary space for displays of masculine vigor, even though a few women infiltrated this space by disguising themselves as young men. However, the heroine of the dime novel never fully abandons her feminine charms, and could just as easily revert back to the domestic sphere once she decides to marry.

As Smith’s chronology of the “Sons of Leatherstocking” demonstrates, the

Western hero achieves masculine virility at the price of maturity. Ironically, he had to get younger in order to gain the sexual potency lacking in the original Leatherstocking. As with so many of his peers, Smith turns to the figure of the adolescent in order to solve the conundrum of the “beyond innocence” debate. In his young hero, Smith finds an

American that is adaptable, competent, light-hearted, and noble. Smith’s hero travels out West in order to achieve a “fresh start,” a chance to renew himself and to begin anew. Spending time in the dirt and the gravel, the muck and the mud, this hero searches for a new self amidst the American wilderness. It is this myth of renewal that wove itself into the land. Yet this promise of renewal, Smith concedes, is responsible for

“[making] it difficult for Americans to think of themselves as members of a world community because it has affirmed that the destiny of this country leads her away from

Europe toward the agricultural interior of the continent” (260). A hopeful story turned cynical, Smith’s narrative of the virgin land myth positioned Cold War America on the verge of adulthood yet again.

Bombs, Boys, and Legendary Fathers: Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness

Smith’s sense that Americans must move beyond innocence in order to “think of

themselves as members of a world community” (260) came to fruition in the most seasoned of travelers from the Myth and Symbol school—Perry Miller. An adventure- seeker and staunch supporter of U.S. military service, Miller traveled first to Central

Africa on an oil ship, and later went to Europe as a member of the OSS division of the

U.S. military during the Second World War. After the war, Miller continued his adventures as a sort of academic diplomat, traveling in all regions of the world. These experiences not only made Miller one of the most famous members of the Myth and

Symbol school—one who alongside Matthiessen helped found Harvard University’s

“History of American Civilization” program— they shaped the way he thought and wrote about American history and culture. Like the other Myth and Symbol proponents, Miller traveled backwards in order to understand his present. However, unlike Lewis and

Smith, Miller did not view America’s beginnings as a time of innocence; rather, he saw in the early contact period, especially the time immediately after the generation of the

Puritan Founders, an enormous amount of controversy concerning the future. This controversy prefigured that in his own time, and Miller took full advantage of these striking parallels in order to warn his readers about the dangerous path that the United

States was following in the early Cold War, most notably through the decision to enter into a nuclear power struggle.

Miller’s concern about the fate of America is most evident in the eponymous chapter of Errand into the Wilderness (1956). Miller begins his study with an overview of the jeremiads of the seventeenth century. The titles of these works, Miller suggests, indicate a “deep disquietude,” which ultimately lies in the speaker’s belief that the children of the New England founders “weren’t the men their fathers had been” (2-3).

How did they arrive at this conclusion? Miller answers with a fascinating etymology of the word “errand” and its significance within the context of early America. An “errand” can mean two things: “a short journey on which an inferior is sent to convey a message or perform a service for his superior,” or “the actual business on which the actor goes, the purpose itself, the conscious intention in mind” (3). Miller insists that it was the ambiguity of the word that captured the imagination of the sons of the Pilgrim Fathers.

What they wanted desperately to know was whether they were errand boys or the inheritors of an errand. And if they were inheritors of a divine mission, were they fulfilling the nation’s errand, or had they failed to do so through their own incompetence? And, finally, how did their natural surroundings influence the errand bequeathed upon them by their fathers?

As his first few pages indicate, the “errand into the wilderness” that constitutes

Miller’s theme is underpinned by the tension between fathers and their sons, an anxiety that previews Miller’s own concerns about the fate of the nation in the “atomic era.”

Having grown up, boys must question their position in the New World, and determine whether they will follow in their father’s footsteps or hew a new path in the world. This may seem a natural process, yet Miller warns that the questions raised by New

Englanders were serious business indeed. The answers offered would determine the fate of the nation for generations to come, up to and including the Cold War present.

Originally delivered as a speech on May 16, 1952, Miller’s essay warns his readers of the persistence of these questions in the present:

What I believe caught my imagination, among the fuel drums, was a realization of the uniqueness of the American experience; even then I could dimly make out the portent for the future of the world, looking upon

these tangible symbols of the republic’s appalling power. I could see no way of coping with the problem except by going to the beginning. (ix)

And to the beginning he goes. Miller leaves the Congo where he unpacks oil drums in order to embark on a mission, an errand if you will, to define the American experience as he perceived it in the 1920s. As even my brief introduction to Miller’s study indicates, this experience is wracked by the intergenerational struggle between fathers and sons.

It is through youth, and especially the painful process of growing up, that Miller manages to capture what he believes to be the defining aspects of the American experience.

By the time he wrote Errand into the Wilderness, Miller was no longer a young man; he was in his early fifties and ready to grace the world with the knowledge he had gained through his experience. This is evident in Miller’s reflections on his role as a professor:

The one thing I am resolved never to say to a student is that any field of study is exhausted, that all the grain has been threshed. As for that interminable field which may be called the meaning of America, the acreage is immense, and the threshers few. Too often, as in my case, they are sadly deficient in the several skills required for the gigantic labor. (ix)

Through the metaphor of threshers laboring in a wheat field, Miller invites younger scholars to continue studying the “meaning of America:” “Keep on threshing,” he implores; “The fields are rich and will not run fallow.” Miller’s advice, as with the word

“errand,” has a double meaning. On the one hand, Miller participates in the act of bestowing upon the younger generation an errand, where the inheritor may choose how to go about the business of fulfilling his mission; he (or she) is nobody’s “errand boy.”

However, Miller also dwells on the metaphorical fields as a nod to his days as a young graduate student, when he was informed that a study of early America was a “fool’s

errand,” and that he should turn his attention to another historical period. Only through the encouragement of his mentor, Percy Holmes Boynton, did Miller manage to endure.

“I now suspect,” Miller writes, that Boynton encouraged him “simply because he held that a boy should be allowed to do what a boy genuinely, even if misguidedly, is convinced should be done” (viii). In retrospect, Miller suspects that he was indeed not up for the task. It is from his perceived inadequacy as a scholar and a metaphorical father that Miller speaks, and it is for this reason that he must pass on his errand to his intellectual “sons.”

In offering these words of advice, Miller twice defers to the father/son bonds that structure his study. Although the relationship is metaphorical, it speaks to the very circumstances that Miller finds himself in not only as an academic but also as a citizen.

By 1956, when Miller wrote his preface, fear of nuclear warfare had laid on the nation for eight long years. The entrance of Russia into the small circle of nuclear powers meant that Armageddon, brought on by the ideological battle between the United States and Russia, was a real possibility. “In the final oblique reference to his stay in Africa,”

Amy Kaplan argues, “Miller looks back typologically at the fuel drums to find not only the

Puritan past, but also a portent of his own future and his own present in the nuclear age” (“‘Left Alone With America’” 10). As a result, Miller’s study is infused with an urgency regarding the fate of the nation—not in the past, but in the present. Miller’s advice to younger scholars, the future threshers, takes on new significance in this context. If something is not done soon, he implores, there will be no fields to thresh, metaphorical or otherwise. Miller’s preface sets the tone for his subsequent study, which is interspersed with prefatory comments that direct readers towards interpretations that

underscore the importance of defining the nation’s errand in the Cold War context.

Miller, it seems, was not so different from the writers of New England jeremiads.

Due to his status as a founder of American studies and a leading scholar in early

American literature, Errand into the Wilderness has received a great deal of later scholarly attention. Amy Kaplan’s “‘Left Alone With America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture” (1993), while perhaps the best-known essay on the topic, is merely the tip of the iceberg. David Scobey, Andrew Delbanco, and Theodore

Dwight Bozeman each provide a reconsideration of the Puritan errand. Scobey maintains that “The Puritan settlers of New England, we know, were driven by a sense of errand” (3). “But we do not understand so well,” he adds, “how this pervasive sense of decline merged with, shaped, and was shaped by the Puritans’ conception of their own history” (4). Delbanco admits that the backlash against Miller following his death in

1963 is justified, as Miller “was disgusted with liberal impotence in the face of fascism, and he developed as a consequence his animating respect for the neo-Calvinism of

Reinhold Niebuhr” (345-346). Bozeman observes that “the rapid adoption of the ‘errand’ thesis by subsequent students of early America thus marks a notable watershed in recent scholarship;” only to add that “scholars seldom understood [it]…as Miller intended” (231). Each of these scholars recognizes the importance of Miller’s errand thesis, while also acknowledging the fact that Miller’s essay was shaped by its Cold War context.

Subsequent scholars, including Randall Fuller, Nicholas Guyatt, and Murray

Murphey, pick up on the reading of Miller as a man on his own errand. In “Errand into the Wilderness: Perry Miller as American Scholar” (2006), Fuller describes Miller as a

man of action, whose “Cold War anxiety coalesced with his own sense that the study of

America had been coopted by an imperial project that in turn led to intellectual construction and repression” (104). Miller’s insistence that even an intellectual must put away the books in times of war and head out to the battlefield caused him to join the military service during the Second World War, an experience that would shape his reading of the Puritan Fathers. Miller saw the Fathers as men of action like himself, who fought on metaphorical battlefields for their beliefs and values. As Miller writes in his essay on the Puritan errand, the Fathers were “executing a flank attack on the corruption of Christendom” (11). Miller’s Cold War reading of the Puritan errand has led others like Guyatt to conclude that “For a famous historian like Miller, the Cold War offered many opportunities for public prominence and even for academic success, but a much narrower space for pure academic ‘selfishness,’ or for divergent political expression” (127). However, the pressure to conform did not completely control Miller, who does at moments question the United States’ current errand, such as when he notes the “appalling power” of the oil drums in his preface to Errand into the Wilderness, thereby acknowledging the horror of the destructiveness of nuclear weapons. Yet his reverence for the Puritan Fathers also fit with the dominant national feeling during the

Cold War. By constructing his narrative in relation to father/son bonds, Miller casts doubt on the actions of future generations rather than those of the Founding Fathers.

His disgust is directed at those who have distorted the Father’s errand into something monstrous and unrecognizable, not with the original errand itself.

If the Puritan errand was Miller’s thesis, then father/son bonds was his theme.

This theme enables him to bring together ten admittedly disparate essays published

throughout his career, from the early 1930s to the 1950s. While the title piece fits neatly into his project regarding the Puritan errand, Miller’s later essays do not unless one considers them as responses to the genealogical crisis he identifies in his opening essay. Miller’s identification of a “deep disquietude” felt by the second and third generations in Puritan New England, one that ultimately lies in their belief that “they weren’t the men their fathers had been,” launches his study of the Puritan errand (2-3).

In essence, Miller’s essays fit together like a complicated family tree that traces the

Puritan errand from the earliest founders, including Cotton Mather, Thomas Hooker, and

Jonathan Edwards, up to nineteenth century Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo

Emerson. The occasional odd piece in the collection, such as the essay “Religion and

Society in the Early Literature of Virginia,” fits into this framework as it works to bring coherence to the errand of the earliest Founding Fathers. Miller writes:

For the men of 1600 to 1625, the new land was redemption even as it was also riches; the working out of society and the institutions cannot be understood (and it has not been understood), except as an effort toward salvation. Religion, in short, was the really energizing propulsion in this settlement, as in others. (101)

Miller identifies the way in which a religious mission drove leaders of the colonies up and down the Northeastern coastline, providing them with a sense that they were setting an important errand into motion.

A closer look at some of Miller’s later essays from the 1950s demonstrates the way in which he took the Puritans’ environment of the wilderness into account when constructing the family tree of what he called “my America” (xii). In his prefatory notes for “Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening,” which was originally published in

1952, Miller begins by stating:

At the risk of sacrificing every pretense to scientific respectability, but out of respect for the theme of this volume, I am ready to say that the Great Awakening was the point at which the wilderness took over the task of defining the objectivities of the Puritan errand. I am the more prepared to say this because Jonathan Edwards was a child of the wilderness as well as of Puritanism. (153)

Miller’s description of one of the most famous Puritan leaders as a “child of the wilderness” operates on multiple levels. On the one hand, it acknowledges Edwards’ birth in Connecticut and his later exile in Stockbridge, a missionary village beyond the frontier line. On the other hand, it repeats the language associated with future explorers like Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, who were also described as “children of the forest.”

Miller uses this phrase in order to depict one of the Puritan Fathers as ruggedly masculine, a man of action who combats opposition and who possesses the surefire attitude that Miller admired.

Miller’s essay on Edwards returns to his major theme of father/son bonds through a discussion of the halfway covenant. Just as in his opening essay, Miller presents yet another case where Puritan children cannot live up to the strong fierce example of the

Founding Fathers. The second and third generations “had not had the kind of experience that qualified their fathers” to be full members of the church; they were, in

Miller’s words, “inheritors of a revolution, but [were] not themselves revolutionaries”

(159). By turning to a discussion of the halfway covenant, Miller is able to map the way in which the wilderness shaped Puritan experience. It was in the wilds that the sons of the Puritan Fathers grew restless and unruly and began to deviate from the original religious mission. Unlike a revolutionary figure such as Edwards, they could not manage to cultivate religious fervor and pass this inspiration onto the rest of the members of the community. However, if the church leaders were to exclude those who failed to meet the

qualifications of full membership, then the entire community would splinter and there would be no hope whatsoever of continuing the errand. David Scobey argues that the controversy over the halfway covenant was more than just a religious squabble; rather, it was rooted in the anxiety of the second and third generations regarding the Puritan errand:

Here was a wellspring for the gloom concerning declension. The inability to reconcile the competing principles proved to the second-generation divines not merely the depravity of humans in general but their own particular insufficiency vis-à-vis the errand with which God had honored them. In their self-abasement they idealized the founding fathers of New England, enthroning them next to scriptural heroes to pass judgment on their own failures. They did not understand that the fathers’ church order seemed so monolithic because its contradictions required the passing of time to come to ripeness. (10)

Scobey’s reconsideration of the Puritan errand demonstrates the extent to which filial piety infused the rhetoric of the younger generation, a rhetoric that was centered on the corruption of the sons of the Puritan Fathers.

Miller’s extensive analysis of the halfway covenant and the way in which the wilderness prompted the establishment of this new category of church membership demonstrates the extent to which fear of failing the Fathers plagued the sons. These

American-born-and-bred boys needed to capture the qualities now attributed to the first generation through jeremiads that had the quality of myth. This fear of failure, Miller continues in a later essay, “Nature and the National Ego,” was intricately tied to nature and the emerging national ego. Here, Miller claims that Nature versus civilization is “the

American theme . . . You can find it in the politics of Andrew Jackson, in the observations of foreign travelers, in the legend of Abraham Lincoln, in Stephen Douglas no less than in Francis Parkman” (205). For Miller, recognition of the ubiquity of the

Nature versus civilization theme is imperative, as it allows readers to see the connection

between eighteenth and nineteenth-century America. The Puritan errand, Miller concludes, was thus still very much alive in the nineteenth century (205). By tracing the evolution of the Puritan errand, Miller again frames his essay in terms of the central theme of father and son bonds. Writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson are inheritors of the

Puritan errand, much distant sons who need to find ways to complete the Founders’ original religious mission. In developing his thesis in his later essay, Miller cites the common dichotomies associated with the division between Nature and civilization, the most important of which is “the innocent and the debauched” (208). He continues to make reference to the saving grace of the wilderness, the scene in which Puritans believed they could best complete their religious mission because it was free from the corruption of the Old World. In this sense, the wilderness provided a layer of protection from the evils associated with civilization. As Miller develops his argument, he invokes phrases commonly associated with childhood innocence, including “tender” (208),

“young republic” (211), “simplicity” (212), “young revel” (212), “vigorous youth” (213), and “young empire” (213). The repetition of the term “young,” coupled with Miller’s description of America as an infant nation making its first “faltering steps” (211), secures the association of the United States with childhood. It is through the American wilderness, Miller concludes, that “America can progress indefinitely into an expanding future” and secure indefinitely the innocence associated with youth.

“Nature and the National Ego” appears confidently to announce the ability of

America to continue indefinitely the Puritan errand, since Nature will always be at hand to purify the rascally sons of the Founding Fathers. Yet Miller’s final essay casts doubt on this optimism, most notably in its prefatory note, where Miller observes, “Can an

errand, even an errand into the wilderness, be run indefinitely? To this question, it seems, Americans must constantly revert” (217). Not only must this question continually be asked, Miller bemoans, but he fears that the threat of the end of the world, particularly in the form of atomic warfare, leaves America with few choices: “What will

America do—what can America do—with an implacable prophecy that there is a point in time beyond which the very concept of a future becomes meaningless?” (217). The anxiety that is apparent in these lines fits with the somber topic of the essay, the millennial belief in Armageddon. To recognize the possibility of an end, Miller notes, means to admit that the errand must end at some point—it cannot continue indefinitely.

This knowledge in turn strains the future generation’s sense of duty, making it evermore possible that the Puritan errand, in these moments of crisis, will be abandoned altogether.

The way future generations interpret the end of the world, or the “approaching, colossally violent catastrophe” of judgment (223), is ultimately determined at the crossroads of religion and science. In this way, Miller brings his collection of essays to the present. “After centuries of calculation,” Miller notes, “the date and moment [of the end of the world] become precise: it was 0815 hours—not 2400—on 6 August, 1945, and the place was not Rome after all” (238). In citing the exact moment when the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Miller reminds readers that the scientific possibility of ultimate annihilation takes away the divine nature of judgment, as well as its promised renewal following destruction. With the human power to decimate the world, a new question emerges: “If humanity has to do the deed itself, can it bring about more than the explosion? Can it also produce the Judgment?” (239). Cast in this light,

Miller’s earlier despair becomes understandable. A former member of the Operation for

Strategic Services (OSS), even Miller’s most harrowing memories of war—shooting a

German soldier—do not measure up to the final chapter of the Second World War.

Miller could defend U.S. actions in Europe and see them in terms of the fight first led by the Puritan Fathers; he could even describe the Founding Fathers as soldiers like himself, setting out to complete a “flank attack” on the battlefield. While Miller always depicted the sons of the Founding Fathers as lesser, it is in this moment that he not only casts doubt on the actions of future generations, but on the entire concept of an errand.

Perhaps, he suggests, the Fathers were wrong after all. Perhaps the errand lacked the redemptive qualities the Fathers claimed for it.

Miller’s concluding ambivalence about the Puritan errand thus follows a pattern in the Myth and Symbol scholarship. In each case, the author expresses doubt and anxiety about the nation’s future, concluding that the myths of the past are no longer strong enough to carry the United States through the turbulent times of the atomic age.

A return to innocence, according Miller, Smith, and Lewis, is impossible because the

United States is now “beyond innocence.” The task heretofore is to determine how the nation will break from its history of celebrating innocence and enter maturity in a way that allows it to deal effectively with the new challenges of the present. In Lewis’s words, the “new hopelessness” that appeared after the war involved “a wilful [sic] return to innocence based upon a wilful ignorance, momentarily popular in the market place of culture but with no hold at all upon the known truth of experience” (196). As Lewis’s remarks indicate, there was a strong sense that the national feeling of hopelessness and despair was not sign of maturity, but rather of a melancholy more associated with

adolescence. The United States was on the brink of something new, in between one age and another; yet it was still too early for the Myth and Symbol scholars to see where the nation would go from here. For all their urging, it seemed that the United States really was still in the process of growing up. This developmental metaphor would continue to fascinate future intellectuals, who took their cue from early American studies scholars and gave the conflicts of their own generation the bodily shape of the child.

CHAPTER 3 AMERICAN ADAM (AND EVE): INNOCENCE, YOUTH, AND THE “AGE OF HOPELESSNESS”

It has been said that America is always coming of age; but it might be more fairly maintained that America has come of age in sections, here and there—whenever its implicit myth of the American Adam has been a defining part of the writer’s consciousness.

—R.W.B. Lewis The American Adam

The adolescent, then, would seem to be particularly suited to the embodiment of the American Adam: passing through a developmental stage that allows idealistic rebellion against mature society, in full literary exploitation of this peculiarly American resistance, yet implicitly reassuring the reader that the Adamic character will in fact “grow up” and perhaps carry his idealism forward into society.

—Pamela Hunt Steinle In Cold Fear

In his landmark study The American Adam (1955), R.W.B. Lewis identifies the

“main character” of the master narrative formulated by the Myth and Symbol school.

This protagonist is an isolated hero who stands apart from the crowd precisely because he is “a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history” (1). A male explorer who is both virtuous and resourceful, and who is capable of surviving in the wilderness without the aid of anyone else, the American Adam is a national myth that derives from the history of U.S. expansion. This myth expresses a deeply rooted desire for the U.S. to obtain and preserve innocence, to essentially separate itself from the corruption of the Old World and begin anew. The American

Adam’s purpose, in fact, was to secure the image of an innocent America by persuading the nation’s citizens that past historical crimes such as the colonization of Native

American lands were in fact innocent acts. By establishing the renewing capabilities of the uniquely American landscape, the American Adam myth implied that one could err

and still preserve one’s innocence since it was possible to be reborn again and again.

Under the sway of the American Adam myth, it was possible for Americans to ignore the conflicts that arose from westward expansion or other similar acts of colonization precisely because there were no consequences to these acts—they could simply be washed away with time.

The distorting effect of the American Adam myth was not only intended to erase darker spots in the nation’s history but also to erase important historical actors from the national narrative. Women, for example, receive scant attention in Lewis’s interpretation of the American Adam myth, an oversight that has not gone unnoticed by Myth-Symbol critics. As the name of Lewis’s American hero indicates, the American Adam glorifies male youth, a position that is problematic because it encourages gender binaries that position men as active and women as passive. In her 1976 landmark study, The Lay of the Land, Annette Kolodny suggests that this position was not uncommon among male scholars like Lewis, many of whom consistently feminized the Western landscape and reaffirmed the gender stereotype that women are passive in the process. As Kolodny notes in her introduction, “gendering the land as feminine was nothing new,” even as early as the sixteenth century, in which her study begins (8). While I will address the relationship between women and the land at further length in my chapter on the virgin land myth, it is worth noting the relationship here since the American Eve, the female counterpart to the American Adam that is later conceived by twentieth-century American novelists, also has a unique bond with nature. In her interrogation of this relationship,

Kolodny brings to light the importance of this gender binary for early male settlers (and later for male myth-and-symbol scholars). The American Eden, she writes, “is a realm of

nurture, abundance, and unalienated labor within which all men are truly brothers” (4).

As Kolodny suggests, the feminized landscape is present merely to support men and the “great” deeds that these men will carry out during their lifetimes.

Lewis’s elision of discussions of race and gender was not unique. Rather, it was part of the larger mission of the Myth-and-Symbol school to define, describe, and celebrate U.S. national identity. Determined to present a more unified version of

America, Lewis and his peers revived celebrated national myths like the American

Adam in order to build up moral and to combat the rising threat of communism. This is not to say that Lewis completely avoided considering how race and gender played a role in the shaping of the American Adam myth, but he did downplay these issues in favor of coherence. As the title of my chapter indicates, the American Eve was often placed into parentheses, more of a polite afterthought than a topic of serious consideration. Lewis, for example, makes several promising remarks about the

American Eve, acknowledging that Adam, even in American variants, was never truly alone. Furthermore, he provocatively suggests that women might also have unique resources in which to stand up against the world, yet he never goes so far as to indicate how the American Eve’s relationship to land and community might differ from that of the

American Adam. In one of the many lists of Adamic figures that Lewis provides, he includes Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer alongside the likes of Jay Gatsby and

Huckleberry Finn, but again never explains why they appear in this list or how they differ from their male counterparts (128).

Angered by the absence of women and racial minorities from the national narrative, some began to revise the dominant national myth. These revisionist labors

involved the transformation of the male explorer into a young woman who retained many of the original traits of this hero but who likewise challenged the American Adam’s ability to separate himself from history. Moreover, many of the later retellings of the

American Adam myth pay tribute to the colonial history of the United States, either by casting their heroine as Native American or else by weaving the history of U.S. colonization into the heroine’s quest in some manner. This chapter charts the transformation of the American Adam into his female counterpart: the American Eve.

While the American Eve lacks the divine powers of the American Adam—she is far more human—she still manages to synthesize many of the U.S.’s most cherished values and traditions. The American Eve is therefore a step forward, a recognition of the flaws in the U.S.’s national mission and the errors of the past. The American Eve thus departs from her namesake in that she is not the one who tempts Adam to sin, but rather exposes the sin that existed all along.

Dreaming Up Eve: A Male Writer’s Perspective

In his 1960 children’s classic, Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O’Dell set the stage for more rigorous revisions of a classic American myth that for so long ignored the participation of women and minorities in the history of the American frontier. In fact, part of O’Dell’s legacy consists of his dedication to the inclusion of young ethnic women as protagonists in his historical fiction. Unusual for an author whose stories were primarily set in the American West, O’Dell managed to invert the familiar tropes of the male explorer setting out West in search of adventure. His heroines, while deeply enmeshed in Anglo-American stereotypes about ethnic minorities, made a modest step forward by challenging the dominant belief that the American West was a space intended solely for virulent men. The protagonist of Island, Karana, is no exception, as she manages to

survive alone on the island of her birth after a series of catastrophic events that render her the sole survivor of her tribe. Displaying many of the traits of the American Adam,

Karana must demonstrate a resourcefulness that will sustain her throughout her years of solitude. The inclusion of such a plucky, self-sufficient heroine departed from preconceived notions about the heroes of the American West. In fact, O’Dell had to fight to maintain his heroine’s gender, as his publisher assumed that a female protagonist would squelch the novel’s chances for success.

O’Dell’s background helped prime him for his ultimate intervention in the

American Adam myth. As a white male who was born in 1899, O’Dell witnessed firsthand the transformation of his California hometown from a small frontier post to a modern industrial city. Such a rapid change left a mark on the young O’Dell, so that when he finally began writing historical fiction for children at the ripe old age of sixty, he had a thing or two about which to lecture his young consumerist audience. O’Dell’s fiction is notorious for glamorizing the past, especially the values associated with

American pioneers, such as resourcefulness, perseverance, and virtuousness. His personal feelings of alienation—he referred to Californians as “just a bunch of uprooted people” (D. Russell 173)—fueled his fiction and his choice of marginalized peoples for his protagonists. Because of California’s geographical location and colonial history, the

Native American girl is one figure that O’Dell returns to at multiple points in his career.

His first efforts to portray the experience of the Native American people when California was still under the “ownership” of the Spanish empire remain an enlightening mix of the classic concerns and literary foibles that would eventually haunt O’Dell’s body of work for children.

O’Dell’s integration of Native American protagonists, particularly young girls, has long been the source of heated debates among literary scholars, especially those in children’s literature. Carol Anita Tarr, one of the leading O’Dell critics, has actively worked to push beyond the cloud of reverence that seems to hang around O’Dell’s body of children’s fiction and to draw attention to the harmful aspects of O’Dell’s formulaic writing style. In “Fool’s Gold: Scott O’Dell’s Formulaic Vision of the Golden West”

(1992), Tarr writes, “In several of O’Dell’s novels, there are tried-and-true formulas that are reworked. Even a casual reader can see the similarities between Island of the Blue

Dolphins and Sarah Bishop” (19).1 Tarr insists that these formulas are potentially harmful for young readers, since they tend to pass on stereotypes about ethnic minorities and simplify complex historical events. Others, such as Melissa Kay

Thompson, place O’Dell’s writing into perspective, suggesting that his formulaic writing is a result of notions about the ability of children to understand complex information.

“Children’s book authors and critics,” Thompson claims, “typically stereotype indigenous peoples” (353). These stereotypes, whether positive or negative, intentional or not, tend to contribute to feelings of white supremacy and justify American expansionism

(Thompson 353). What Tarr, Thompson, and other children’s literature critics concerned with the representations of ethnic minorities in children’s fiction underscore is the detrimental effect that conventional approaches to writing for children can have in the long-run.

The concerns of children’s literature critics, while providing insightful commentary on the representation of race in Island of the Blue Dolphins, do not consider how

1 Tarr has written about O’Dell’s work on multiple occasions. Some of her more relevant essays include “Apologizing for O’Dell: Too Little, Too Late” (2002) and “An Unintentional System of Gaps: A Phenomenological Reading of Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins” (1997).

O’Dell’s novel contributes to the reinvention of the American Adam. For all his flaws,

O’Dell most certainly made a progressive step forward when he decided to write a novel about a young Native American woman trapped alone on the island of her birth. O’Dell, to be sure, was likely not thinking of Lewis or the American Adam—he never did like school and only attended college long enough to take the few classes he felt might be useful in his career as a writer; yet he was most certainly thinking about the West, and the myths associated with the West that Lewis engages with in The American Adam.

Indeed, his decision to use a female protagonist, despite his editor’s resistance, indicates an investment in the female perspective that ran counter to the dominant opinions about Western heroes. O’Dell’s commitment to Karana therefore begins to contradict the belief that the American West was a masculine space and questions the gender stereotypes that underlie the youthful hero of R.W.B. Lewis’s The American

Adam (1955). In the process, O’Dell begins to answer the question that Lewis fails to in

The American Adam: what is the difference between the American Adam and the

American Eve?

Building a Female-Centered World

O’Dell does not immediately define the American Eve from her male predecessor, but he does immediately begin to question assumptions about gender.

Through the opening lines of Island of the Blue Dolphins, O’Dell resists defining his spunky female protagonist by her gender and focuses instead on developing her character:

I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island. At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings. At last in the rising sun it became what it really was—a red ship with two red sails. (1)

While the protagonist quickly reveals that she is twelve years old (1), it isn’t until several pages later that she fully reveals the details of her origin. She declares that she is a member of a tribe led by Chief Chowig, that the Chief is her father, and that she is known by the name of Won-a-pei-lei, or The Girl with the Long Black Hair (5). At this point, O’Dell’s protagonist also provides readers with her “secret name,” Karana, which immediately establishes a bond between the narrator and the reader. By initially withholding information about Karana’s origins, O’Dell is able to establish a sense of place and a sense of character that is free of preconceived notions about gender or race.

This tactic of withholding is just one way that O’Dell creates a world where female experience trumps male experience. As she describes her daily life before it is disrupted by the arrival of the ship with the blood-red sails, Karana depicts her tribe as a patriarchal society where women gather food, watch children, and provide domestic comforts for men. Her initial tasks involve gathering roots and watching over her young brother, Ramo, an indication that such training begins early in her tribe. In such a world, a woman’s voice would not normally be heard, and yet it is Karana who is speaking to us. Karana’s first words, which announce a terrible tragedy that befell her tribe, are thus an important signal that her story is atypical. O’Dell uses this tragedy to build a female- centered world, where Karana’s voice can be heard precisely because she is the only person left to speak.

O’Dell steadily works up to Karana’s isolated existence by first having the foreigners, fur traders led by a Russian, kill most of the men in the tribe, including Chief

Chowig. This plot development allows O’Dell to introduce readers to a society where

women take on duties traditionally bestowed upon men. In a speech immediately following the murder of the tribesmen, Kimki, the new chief, declares, “The women, who were never asked to do more than stay at home, cook food, and make clothing, now must take the place of the men” (25). Karana explains that one repercussion of this decision was a backlash from the few remaining tribesmen. Feeling that the women have usurped their rightful places in the tribe—and, O’Dell hints, jealous of the phenomenal success the women have achieved as hunters—the men complain to the tribe leader and successfully intervene so that the women must return to their original domestic duties (26). Such a reversal displays the tenuous nature of the newfound power of the female members of the tribe. Through the power struggles of the tribe,

O’Dell acknowledges the difficult position of women and the way that tradition can often stifle those who are fully capable of carrying out male tasks. His presentation of these early scenes demonstrates sympathy for the plight of women and a deep desire to identify alternative social relationships where men and women are treated equally.

O’Dell’s solution involves the complete isolation of Karana, the Indian princess whose lineage primes her for the role of sole survivor of her tribe. When the tribe decides that they must leave their homeland for the nearby shores of California, Karana jumps off the ship to save her little brother, Ramo, who was accidentally left behind on the island. Karana’s tribe cannot return despite being aware of the children’s absence due to a storm. The storm prevents the tribe from safely returning to the island and ensures that Karana and her brother will remain alone on the island for a long period of time. The absence of the tribal leaders provides Karana with free reign of the island and opens up a space where she can assert her wisdom and power without the judgment of

male leaders. If this were not enough to secure the female-centered world that O’Dell desires, another catastrophic event results in the death of Karana’s younger brother,

Ramo. While these numerous tragedies add to the complexity of Karana’s character, they also open up a space for Karana to exist without men. Even Ramo’s declaration of his desire to rule over the island, a threat that Karana fails to take seriously due to her brother’s age, is swiftly dealt with by O’Dell.

Although O’Dell’s finds imaginative solutions that enable his female heroine to flourish, the plot of Island is also largely dictated by the sparse record left by the San

Nicolas woman. In her introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the book, Lowis

Lowry provides a brief overview of the variations of the true story of the San Nicolas woman upon whom the novel is based, and who was left to survive alone on the island of her people after being left behind during a mass exodus to the shores of California.

This woman, Lowry notes, was unable to tell her own story because those who found her could not understand her language. Her story was ultimately claimed by those who found her and changed with each re-telling:

The versions of why this happened vary. The simplest: A storm was coming, they had to hurry, and one woman didn’t make it to the beach in time. A little embellishment: The woman was with the group on the beach but ran off to find her missing child, and the crew, with a strong storm beginning, couldn’t wait. The most romantic account: She was already on the ship when she realized her child was not among them, and she dived overboard and swam back. (vi-vii)

O’Dell selects what Lowry claims to be “the most romantic account” of the San Nicolas woman, with one noteworthy alteration that Lowry suspects was made with his young audience in mind: instead of a woman leaving her people to save her child, O’Dell has a young girl jump off the ship to rescue her younger brother (viii). However, it must be

remembered that O’Dell wrote this story without a child audience in mind, believing that he was writing for adults when he initially crafted his story.

The change in the relationship between the woman and the child does indeed give O’Dell a chance to relate to a younger audience, who can more easily identify with

Karana’s growing pains as she attempts to survive on her island alone. However, it also provides a link to the American Adam myth. Karana’s youth is just one of the many strikingly similarities that she shares with the American Adam. As R.W.B. Lewis writes in the introduction to his book, the American Adam is “a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history” (1). The youth of the American

Adam celebrates the uniquely American landscape, suggesting that it is a space where one can continually renew oneself and return to the innocence generally associated with childhood. O’Dell’s choice of a young female protagonist, in light of this definition, is suitable for a novel bent on challenging traditional assumptions about women. O’Dell retains the youthful qualities of the American Adam, especially his resourcefulness and self-sufficiency, and focuses predominately on the choice to cast this hero as a male.

Through the many twists and turns of his plot, he engages with the assumptions that the

New World is a place of fresh starts and encourages readers to consider the contributions of women to the early history of the United States. O’Dell’s heroine rises to the challenge of critics who claim that the American Adam presents the United States as a homogenous culture at the expense of women and racial minorities.

Rather than bend Karana’s character so that she conforms to the traits associated with the American Adam, O’Dell establishes a new set of relations in his

American Eve prototype. O’Dell’s young female protagonist can hunt, build, and

complete other tasks necessary for her survival, but she is also haunted by the knowledge that these tasks are traditionally forbidden to women. Karana’s struggles with this knowledge and the memory of her tribe signal that she cannot live completely free of the traditions dictated by male leaders despite living completely alone. The guilt

Karana feels when completing male tasks differentiates her from the American Adam, a figure who is able to live “happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race” (5). Through Karana’s multiple tragedies, O’Dell indicates the inability for Karana to begin anew. While she does in fact survive, the memory of the massacre of her people and the traditions of her tribe haunt her throughout her adventures. Unlike the American Adam described by Lewis, O’Dell’s Eve is deeply connected to her ancestral past, a connection that prevents her from appearing completely free of the trace of history like her male counterpart. Karana’s freedom is predicated on her ability to confront and accept her origins, a task that O’Dell indicates is deeply challenging for this young survivor.

This challenge is best represented by two pivotal events that occur in the narrative: Karana’s decision to burn her old village and the night she spends in an old barrow. Faced with the reality of her abandonment, Karana must first decide whether or not she will live in her old village or find a new home somewhere on the island. While the village is a place of familiarity and potential comfort, the violent massacre of her people and her recent abandonment render it “unhomely.”2 Karana remarks that the village turned gravesite “reminded me of all the people who were dead and those who

2 Karana’s experience in the village is reminiscent of Freud’s definition of the uncanny. As Freud explains in “The Uncanny” (1919), the uncanny is both heimlich (homely, familiar, etc.) and unheimlich (unhomely, strange, etc.) at the same time (132-134). It is this tension between the familiar and unfamiliar that makes it impossible for Karana to continue living in the village.

were gone. The voice of the surf seemed to be their voices speaking” (47). Haunted by her memories, Karana destroys one hut after another until her entire village is nothing more than ash. The act of burning is cathartic for Karana, but it also recalls the violence that resulted in her initial isolation. Karana will again repeat these acts of violence when she vows to kill the wild dogs who murdered her brother (46), as well as when she tosses jewels given in exchange for otter pellets into the sea (51). These acts of violence occur in rapid succession as Karana works through the grief she experiences as a result of the recent murder of her father and the massacre of other tribal members.

In foregrounding Karana’s grief and rage, O’Dell not only develops a realistic picture of her suffering, he provides a means for Karana to break away from old tradition and begin anew.

This shift in Karana’s association with her ancestral past is clearest in her performance of male tasks. When Karana begins to consider seriously what she must do to survive, she quickly realizes that she must make weapons to hunt for food and protect herself from the wild dogs on the island. Yet the decision to make weapons is a difficult one for Karana, who recalls that tribal tradition forbids the “making of weapons by women” (49). More than once, Karana is haunted by this tribal edict and hesitates to construct or handle a weapon. In an oft-quoted passage, Karana wonders what will happen if she makes a weapon:

Would the four winds blow in from the four directions of the world and smother me as I made the weapons? Or would the earth tremble, as many said, and bury me beneath its falling rocks? Or, as others said, would the sea rise over the island in a terrible flood? Would the weapons break in my hands at the moment when my life was in danger, which is what my father had said? (52)

The final warning from her father, more than the others, is especially meaningful for

Karana, who is terrified that her weapon will crumble in her time of need (76, 78). The fact that the father’s word haunts Karana is relevant in a narrative that is bent on constructing a female-centered world. In order for Karana to fully embrace her female power, she must find a means to circumnavigate tribal tradition while still retaining respect for her ancestors.

This confrontation between present and past reaches its peak when Karana is trapped within a watery cave that serves as a barrow for her ancestors. Faced with these grotesque visions of the past, Karana turns away in fear and huddles with her dog, Rontu. “I knew that the skeleton who sat on the ledge playing his flute was one of my ancestors,” she remarks, “and the others with the glittering eyes, though only images, were too, but still I was sleepless and afraid” (124). The “glittering eyes” of the human images haunt Karana much like the tribal traditions passed down by her father.

These eyes seem to her “more alive than the eyes of those who live” (123). While the eyes still emit an aura of power, these effigies are in fact no more than decaying remnants of a lost tribal heritage. These sculpted human figures, meant to represent past tribal leaders, are marked neither as male nor female, and referred to with gender- neutral pronouns such as “its” and “their.” These genderless bodies may watch as

Karana sleeps in the dark cave, a womb-like structure, but they lack the power of the living. With the men of the tribe dead and only these moldering ancestral remains to keep watch over the past, Karana can now set out to construct a new tradition that takes female power into account. Karana’s final decision not to look back at the glittering eyes as she leaves the gravesite and her re-naming of the cave asserts her

power over her situation and her reconciliation of the past with the present (124).

Already in love with her island, Karana is now free to conquer and reclaim the land.3

O’Dell incorporates many other traits of the American Adam in Island of the Blue

Dolphins, including loneliness, self-sufficiency, compassion, and a sense of betrayal.

Yet it is his discussion of origins, specifically in relation to one’s responsibility to an ancestral past, that make his narrative a unique contribution and beneficial critique of previous interpretations of the American Adam myth. O’Dell underscores one of the key differences between the American Adam and American Eve: the American Adam has broken with his past while the American Eve is haunted by hers. Young American Eves, not yet fixed in their position within a dominant culture, are able to utilize their skills to not only survive but also challenge the very structure of their world. They challenge the

Old World/New World dichotomy in order to effectively blend past and present. As my next two case studies will show, the American Eve’s status as a young girl becomes evermore crucial as women writers begin actively to challenge the silencing effects of

American national myths. This between state becomes a powerful symbol of the feelings of disempowerment experienced by women and ethnic minorities in U.S. culture.

The American Eve in Native Literature

Chickasaw author Linda Hogan returns to many of the concerns articulated in

Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins in her popular 1995 novel, Solar Storms. A

3 Karana’s interaction with the native animals, while sympathetic, does mirror the more violent acts of colonization enacted by the Russian-led Aleut tribe. For instance, Karana clips the wings of a few birds in order to prevent them from flying off. The cave also is a pivotal moment that marks the end of Karana’s solitude. It is shortly thereafter that she befriends a female member of the Aleut tribe, Tutok, and then longs for human companionship. Her wish is soon fulfilled as a Spanish ship comes to “rescue” her. Forced to wear a “scratchy” dress instead of her native clothes, Karana’s future remains uncertain in this final scene.

novel about a young Native American girl’s journey to reunite with her biological family,

Solar Storms addresses the societal traditions that limit female power and the negative impact of colonization. Much like O’Dell, Hogan creates a female protagonist who demonstrates the many traits of the American Adam—self-reliance, isolation, loneliness, and compassion—while also creating a female sanctuary where women can thrive and celebrate their unique skills and gifts. Set in the dreary town of Adam’s Rib, Solar

Storms also parallels O’Dell’s fictional world in that it takes place in a society in which women are in the dominant role as a result of white interference. Despite their many similarities, however, Hogan’s novel departs from Island by delving more deeply into the racial issues that sets Island’s plot into motion: the colonization of Native Americans.

Hogan’s Native heritage and her first-hand experience of issues that shape the lives of young Native girls is what in large part allows her to more accurately address racial and gender conflict, effectively avoiding the stereotypes that predominate in

O’Dell’s classic children’s book. Drawing upon her experiences as a young girl and as an adoptive mother, Hogan reflects on the repercussions of an “unnamed grief.” In her memoir, The Woman Who Watches Over the World (2001), Hogan explains that this

“unnamed grief” caused the girls she grew up with to “cut or hit or [burn] themselves, as if it was a way to kill the self or trade the pain of what resided within for external pain”

(56). Hogan observed this same “unnamed grief” in her adopted daughter, Marie, a girl who “showed signs of attachment disorder,” including hallucinations and physical violence (Vernon 41).4 Hogan’s desire to address the pain associated with colonization, especially as it pertains to young women, inspired her to tell the story of a teenage girl

4 Marie’s behavior was the result of severe childhood abuse. Her biological mother, according to Vernon, “burned [her] with cigarettes and hot wires…and pushed [her] out of a car…in an attempt to lose her” (41).

named Angela Jensen, a girl who is removed from her family as a young child and placed into the foster care system.5 Through the adventures of her female protagonist,

Hogan inverts Anglo-American associations with self-reliance in order to expose the negative effects of Euro-American colonization on Native children. As a result, she brings much-needed attention to the racial and gender issues that are silenced through the myth of the American Adam.

Hogan’s fictional fishing town of Adam’s Rib is described as “the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless;” a land “emptied” by fur traders with lakes “too thin for its fish to survive” (21). The people who inhabit this land are described as an “ill-sorted group” with “homely, work-worn hands,” and “accustomed to hard work and…familiar with loneliness” (28). The women especially are unhappy, scarred by their experiences with the fur traders who flocked to their land and abandoned them once the natural resources were depleted, “as if they too were used up animals” (28). As Angel adapts to this desolate environment, she realizes that she is similarly spiritually empty, drained of cultural attachments as a result of her experience in the U.S. foster care system. Her face, brutally scarred by her mother when she was a small child, reflects her traumatic past and connects her to the black lands of Adam’s

Rib, a town shaped by the fur trade and the male explorer’s desire to conquer.6 Like the

5 “Adoption is a big issue for us,” Hogan observes, “I had my own troubles with social services and I began to think that it was really important to write the story of what happens to children when they go home and try to search out their family, or when they are taken away from family and brought into another culture” (Conversations with American Novelists 198). 6 Hogan scholars Christine Jespersen, Jill Fiore, and Irene Vernon have made similar arguments about Angel’s scars.

lands drained of their bounty, Angel is also burned, scarred, and emptied of any capacity to love.

What Hogan presents to readers through her descriptions of Adam’s Rib is a garden and its inhabitants destroyed by the greed of white colonizers. By utilizing

Adamic imagery, Hogan implies that this destruction is the result of Anglo-American intervention. Christine Jespersen notes that “The moniker Adam’s Rib mockingly calls attention to the tropes of the American Adam” (277). Jespersen’s essay, which focuses on Hogan’s resistance to myths of westward expansion such as that found in Frederick

Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, explains how Hogan’s reference to the American Adam addresses the colonization of Native tribes and the destruction of the American landscape. However, Hogan’s selection of the name Adam’s Rib also engages with the traits associated with the traditional American Adam. Like O’Dell’s Karana, Hogan’s female protagonist is weighed down by her history, a history she must confront in order to gain her independence. However, Hogan departs from O’Dell in her definition of independence. While Angel is self-sufficient in the sense that she has the ability to care for herself and survive under harsh conditions, Hogan never indicates that such a lifestyle is preferable. In fact, she encourages readers to understand self-reliance in a way distinct from its older interpretation.

Hogan’s protagonist does not immediately achieve this unique form of self- reliance upon arriving at Adam’s Rib, but instead must transform through a series of renewing experiences that lead to her ultimate development into an American Eve figure. The first transformation occurs at Adam’s Rib, where Angel adapts to her new life

with her paternal great-grandmother, Agnes Iron, and her great great-grandmother,

Dora Rouge. Angel declares,

They [Agnes Iron and Dora Rouge] were my blood kin. I had searched with religious fervor to find Agnes Iron, thinking she would help me, would be my salvation, that she would know and remember all that had fallen away from my own mind, all that had been kept secret by the county workers, that had been contained in their lost records: my story, my life. (27)

As she adjusts to her new life with her biological family, Angel learns that simply being with her blood kin is not enough to heal the wounds of the past. Yet she still believes that they are the key to unlocking the history stolen from her by the social workers. In the initial passages from the opening chapter in Solar Storms, for example, Angel eagerly devises ways to make herself valuable to her blood kin, mentally noting that her strength and youthful energy can be used in order to “earn [her] keep” (33). Angel’s desperate desire to find a place in Agnes’s home derives from her belief that Agnes can help her make sense of her past visually represented in the scars on her face. While

Angel knows that her scars have something to do with her mentally disturbed mother, she does not know how she got them or what her life was like before entering the foster care system. Her memories “had fallen away from my own mind,” and so she must rely on her family members in order to recover them.

Relinquishing her old independent ways and learning to depend on others, especially for emotional love and support, is Angel’s first step towards renewal. Angel senses this change even upon arriving to Adam’s Rib, believing that this new place constitutes a “beginning” for her:

But I felt that I was at the end of something. Not just my fear and anger, not even forgetfulness, but at the end of a way of living in the world. I was at the end of my life in one America, and a secret part of me knew this end

was also a beginning, as if something had shifted right then and there, turned over in me. (25-26)

Angel’s path towards this new beginning bears some resemblance to the older masculine version of the American Adam myth. Angel, much like the youth in Walt

Whitman’s poetry, seeks a new beginning, and this depends on her ability to connect with the landscape around her and the people that inhabit it. Whitman’s speaker in

“Song of Myself” is so much a part of nature, he likens himself to the grass under one’s boot (lines 1339-1340). His power also comes from his ability to identify with the diverse populations of nineteenth-century America, much as Angel’s power is dependent on her ability to reconnect with her tribe.

Hogan further reinforces the path towards renewal espoused in Whitman’s poetry when she shows Angel being removed from the town on Adam’s Rib in order to live on

Fur Island with her step-grandmother, Bush. Angel’s removal to the Island becomes a further step on her path towards renewal, one that is instigated by her blood kin who understand the complexity of her pain and the best remedies for healing it. On Fur

Island, Angel begins to develop the survival skills she earlier lacked. Angel learns to fish, garden, canoe the waterways, and chop the wood needed to survive the harsh winters. With the guidance of her new mother figure, Bush, Angel begins to reform herself, growing in spirit as she learns the stories and cultural practices of her tribe:

I hardly noticed how I grew strong, my hands rough, my arms filled out. It happened gradually. I don’t know how it is that people change, or what is required, or how it moves. I know only what it feels like to change; it’s in the body, in the stomach, in the heart. They ache and then they open. (89)

As Angel opens up to her new mode of living, she begins to develop gifts that please her grandmother(s): “I was the only one I knew of who could see inside water. No one else could do this, not even Bush. She approved of my gift” (85). Angel’s gift is the

result of her openness, her ability to see through the murk of past history. This same openness allows her to penetrate the mystery of her origins, and weave together a narrative from the fragmented memories and stories of the past. Moreover, Angel’s body grows alongside her spirit, so that each time she returns to Adam’s Rib, her great- grandmother Agnes declares that her body is taking on a womanly shape (127, 135).

While these initial events align Hogan’s American Eve with some of the American

Adam variants in R.W.B. Lewis’s The American Adam, including but not limited to

Whitman’s Adam, Hogan also carefully distinguishes her heroine from her male predecessors. Whitman’s romantic notions of communion with nature, for example, have no place in Hogan’s narrative. In fact, Hogan stresses again and again that the destruction of the land and wildlife is rooted in male desire for power and wealth. Even the Indian character, LaRue Marks Time, disrespects nature, and as a result is cursed with bad lack while hunting. Christine Jespersen notes that LaRue’s character is part of

Hogan’s critique of “frontier tales that celebrate trappers as adventurous men who

‘opened’ the West” (277). Angel, who is only just growing into her new self, already sees what her mentor, Bush, recognizes in LaRue’s abuse of nature: an unsettling echo of the pioneers who similarly ravaged the land. When fishing, Angel notes that she catches fish easily while LaRue fails to get even a bite, and that she does so without using “any of the manners, styles, or techniques he insisted I use” (83). Angel already sees what her mentor, Bush, recognizes in LaRue’s abuse of nature: an unsettling echo of the

European pioneers who ravaged the land. Angel notes that she catches fish easily while

LaRue fails to get even a bite, and that she does so without using “any of the manners, styles, or techniques he insisted I use” (83). Angel further recognizes the difference

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between her and LaRue’s approach to the fish when he guts them before killing them: “I have never forgotten how LaRue left the fish on a slave of stone, without skin or flesh.

They were still alive, gill slits moving. Just a reflex, LaRue said. I hated him” (84).

LaRue’s cold exploitative view of nature denies the spirit that Angel has learned to see in the world around her, even in inanimate objects like a fishing hook. His outlook, intended to represent the Anglo-American way of viewing the world, is also aligned with the same perspective that male explorers used to justify the colonization of the “virgin lands.”

Hogan also invokes aspects of Herman Melville’s fallen Adam in order to further distinguish between different interpretations of renewal. Angel quickly learns upon arriving at Adam’s Rib of a “geological oddity” known as the “Hungry Mouth of Water,” a great sucking circular patch in the natural waterways that consumes anything that crosses it (62). In addition to the occasional deer or drunk, the Hungry Mouth once consumed an entire beluga whale dragged from his Arctic home by an exploitative showman. The whale was submerged in the Hungry Mouth’s waters when the animal failed to attract paying customers. Exhausted of its economic worth, the whale is sacrificed to the Hungry Mouth, its body “hoisted up on chains and cast…outside his

[the showman’s] boat to die…until finally it sank in to the open mouth where it remained, an apparition from another world” (63).

The decaying body of the white whale, Catherine Rainwater notes, alludes to the

“pale leviathan” in Moby Dick (105). Moreover, Rainwater compares the story of Eho, a woman who falls in love with a whale, to Ahab’s mad quest to capture Moby Dick. In this way, “Hogan criticizes the Eurocentric perspectives on nature conveyed in Melville's

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romance” (105). Rainwater claims that Hogan achieves this by inserting the story of Eho within the narrative of Solar Storms, and then repeating her reference to Moby Dick when Angel dreams of a white whale swimming and singing above her “with something akin to love [in its eyes]” (291). Rainwater’s interpretation of the story of Eho and

Angel’s dream gives a new way of understanding Angel’s previous preoccupation with the Hungry Mouth’s victims. The carcass of the beluga whale, whose body was tortured by its white owner in life, reminds readers of the colonial venture upon which Moby Dick is modeled. Ahab’s greed, his desire to possess the whale, results in his ultimate destruction—only Ishmael lives to tell the tale.7

These various depictions of the white whale demonstrate that while Angel and her female elders differ in their approach to nature, they are still circumscribed in the history of white masculine violence. Indeed, one of the first things Angel relates in the story of her return to Adam’s Rib is that the town is populated by women known as the

“Abandoned Ones”: “When the land was worn out, the beaver and wolf gone, mostly dead, the men moved on to what hadn’t yet been destroyed, leaving their women and children behind, as if they too were used-up animals” (28). Angel identifies with these fallen women: the scars on her face and her mysterious origins associate Angel too with

Adam after the Fall. Since the fallen Adam was a popular trope in Melville’s work,

Hogan indirectly refers to the American Adam myth through the story of the Abandoned

Ones, conjuring up images of Adam and Eve after their exile from the Garden of Eden.

Recall too that Angel was once abandoned, lost in the U.S. foster care system. The

7 It is worth noting that Ishmael’s survival is made possible when a ship named Rachael discovers him lost at sea. Ishamael’s survival thus depends on the saving grace of the female ship named after the Biblical Rachael, or the woman whose only son Joseph became a leader of the Israelites.

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parallels between the stories that come to define Adam’s Rib and the fragmented history of Angel’s early life merge to critique the tragic heroes in Melville’s work.

Melville’s heroes, according to Lewis, are innocents lost in a world of sin, redeemers who, despite the obstacles, end up “leaving [their] mark upon the world” (127). Angel too will leave her “mark upon the world,” yet she does so in a way that avoids the colonial mindset that informs Lewis’s vision.

Hogan’s rejection of masculine versions of the American Adam myth have resulted in readings of her work within an ecofeminist framework, thus aligning her with such notable earlier feminist critics as Annette Kolodny. Christine Jespersen draws upon Kolodny’s foundational work in order to show how Hogan critiques white male adventurism in Solar Storms. Hogan’s setting in Adam’s Rib, in addition to alluding to the American Adam, also “emphasizes the negative consequences of what Annette

Kolodny has shown to be explorers’ common view of the new world as a ‘maternal garden’ with indigenous women as symbols for it” (Jespersen 276). Silvia Schultermandl similarly reads Solar Storms within an ecofeminist framework. Schultermandl contends that Hogan draws upon the core ideology of ecofeminism, “a philosophy that draws a connection between the domination of sexual, ethnic and social minorities, and the domination of nonhuman nature” (68). Angel’s developing sense of self derives from her ability to connect with her people and the land around her. It is this need to discover a strong identity founded in Native culture that propels Angel on a quest to the land of the

Fat Eaters where her ancestors originated, a task that is initiated when she learns that the lands are now being threatened by a hydroelectric dam project headed by a company named BEEVCO. This plot thread, Schultermandl argues, “adds to a large

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canon of Native American texts whose characters engage in identity formations that entail negotiations between their native heritages and the impact of dominant society”

(67). However, these same plot devices align Hogan with ecofeminism, where a balance between humans and the natural world is valued. Since Hogan’s characters cannot complete their identity quests until they actively fight for the land (Schultermandl

69), their actions provide models for repairing the results of the colonial exploitation in addition to providing readers with an alternative model of how to interact with the natural environment.

The women’s ability to interact with nature in nondestructive ways is often predicated on their abilities to resist the teachings of a patriarchal society. As I noted previously, Angel rejects LaRue’s approach to fishing. Other scholars have noted that maps play a central role in Hogan’s novel. Jespersen maintains that maps are associated with male colonizers, or “flawed human beings who view nature and humans as ‘spoils’” (280). Jespersen points toward one particular map in Solar Storms, where drawings of Indian slaves occupy the map’s four corners (281). Jespersen contrasts the tangible map that is intended to claim land with Hogan’s definition of “deeper maps,” which include indigenous knowledge of land and the stories that occupy that land.8 The fact that the women must eventually learn to navigate the land without the aid of these maps speaks to Hogan’s desire to find alternative ways to interact with nature.

Rainwater further suggests that Hogan’s intent is to seek balance in “male and female energies in the universe” (95). She notes that in her previous novel Mean Spirit

(1990), Hogan populated her narrative with male characters. Solar Storms thus

8 For more on maps in Solar Storms, see also Kelli Lyon Johnson’s “Writing Deeper Maps: Mapmaking, Local Indigenous Knowledges, and Literary Nationalism in Native Women’s Writing.”

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functions as the counterweight to this male dominated story. Together, like the red and blue blanket common in Plains Indian culture (95), the novels work in harmony as

“intertextual twins”: Mean Spirit, or the “red” book filled with male energy balances Solar

Storms, or the “blue” book filled with female energy (96). Hogan is indeed specific when referring to natural elements, distinguishing between male and female rain, the former being hard and sharp and the latter soft, steady droplets.

With her interest in finding balance and her knowledge of American myths that have denied Native Americans’ colonial past, Hogan provides the context for her protagonist to develop into a strong character with attributes of an American Eve that challenges even the most romantic nineteenth-century account of the American Adam figure. Once Angel departs from Adam’s Rib and leaves behind the few men that populate the dying town, she begins to develop even more skills that identify her as a respectable adventurer. For instance, despite her fears about her impending journey to the land of the Fat Eaters, Angel rises to the occasion and carries heavy loads and paddles in turbulent waters. In one of the most riveting scenes on the journey, Angel descends into her canoe and succumbs to the dangerous rapids. Rather than cut through the waters with her paddle, Angel settles into the canoe and lets her hips rock with the constantly changing waters:

We were held in the hands of fighting water. We were at its mercy. Then I remembered John Husk telling me to catch the current and ride it like an animal, and finally, I gave up, giving in to gravity and to the motion of it, allowing my hips to move with it, not against it. (195)

As she develops a stronger connection with nature, Angel begins to dream about healing plants, and learns that this was also one of her female ancestor’s gifts. Angel’s second gift, like her ability to see and navigate through water, identifies her as a healer,

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a nurturer, a giver of life. Rejecting the Judeo-Christian Eve’s association with sin,

Hogan uses moments such as these to create a positive Americanized Eve.

In order redefine the American Eve, Hogan must also challenge her non-Native readers’ understanding of traditionally lauded traits such as self-reliance. Characters such as Bush are isolated lonely figures who parallel the isolated heroes in nineteenth- century classics such as Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Twain’s The

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). However, rather than celebrating the male desire to “light out for the territory” (Twain 220), Hogan stresses the importance of navigating and relating to the land communally. During the early portion of her journey to the Fat Eaters Angel describes the time alone with her grandmothers as one of healing:

The four of us became like one animal. We heard inside each other in a tribal way. I understood this at once and was easy with it. With my grandmothers, there was no such thing as loneliness. Before, my life had been without all its ears, eyes, without all its knowings. Now we, the four of us, all had the same eyes, and when Dora-Rouge pointed a bony finger and said, “This way,” we instinctively followed that crooked finger. (177)

While Angel still feels pain, grief, and even longing for her boyfriend Tommy, she knows that she no longer has to face the world alone. This differs from simply sharing these feelings with others; Angel does at times consult her grandmothers, but there are other times when she keeps her feelings to herself, such as when she cries upon her departure from Adam’s Rib (165). Her desire for privacy is respected, and Angel notes that if anyone saw her tears “she kept silent about it” (165). In this way, Hogan shows that her characters can be together and still retain privacy.

The characters’ approach to sharing emotion and the burden of defending their land and culture contrasts with traditional U.S. conceptions of self-reliance. To be self-

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reliant in the nineteenth-century variants invoked in Lewis’s work, for instance, means to be absolutely alone. Characters such as Cooper’s Leatherstocking might interact with others, but he is ultimately fated to live his life in isolation. This time alone demonstrates the character’s inner strength, his ability to survive outside of the safety net of civilization. It is also the means by which these characters preserve their innocence.

Such a desire for innocence is absent in Hogan’s work. Like the destruction of the

“virgin” forests, Hogan’s characters are already burdened by the tragic traces of colonialism. Angel’s body is testament to this history, and hers is part of a long line of mutilated bodies: her maternal grandmother, mother, and one of her sisters are all also brutally scarred. Since her characters cannot escape their past, they must find alternate ways to move forward. Hogan presents readers with a form of communal healing in which characters share and interact with one another. Healing takes various forms, so that stories of the past are supplemented by the myths and legends of their native tribe.

Since the preservation of these stories depends on interaction across generational lines, self-reliance must take on a new form.

In an essay on the representation of mourning in Solar Storms, Catherine Kunce sheds further light on Hogan’s alternative definition of self-reliance: “Bush’s ‘self- reliance,’ for example, carries neither the Horatio Algerian nor isolationist sentiments.

Ultimately, self-reliant strength functions for communal good. Paradoxically, part of that strength rests in her willingness to relinquish all she possesses, including her self- reliance” (66). Kunce refers here to an earlier scene preceding Angel’s arrival in Adam’s

Rib: a mourning feast following Angel’s removal from her family. Because Bush failed to protect Angel from her mother and the social workers, she proposes a feast to mourn

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Angel’s loss to her family and the tribe as a whole. Kunce notes that this feast is not a tribal ceremony; rather, it is an event Bush makes up in order to find a way to grieve communally. As a Chickasaw Indian and outsider in Adam’s Rib, Bush is accustomed to living on her own and keeping her problems to herself. The mourning feast, however, forces her to interact with others and them in turn to recognize and share her grief. As the feast participants leave, they feel as if they are carrying away part of Bush’s grief

(18). In addition to sharing her grief, Bush gives away her material belongings. Because the feast occurs in the dead of winter, she must depend on others to avoid freezing to death.

As Bush’s mentee, Angel develops a self-reliance similarly predicated on her willingness to “relinquish all she possesses, including her self-reliance” (Kunce 66). She does this by listening to the stories told by her elders, including those of her family in the land of the Fat Eaters. When Angel begins to dream about plants, she discusses these dreams with her grandmothers and then follows the advice of Dora-Rouge, who recognizes the dreams as a gift that her mother, Ek, also possessed (171). When

Agnes sickens, Angel once again listens to her elders when they ask her to draw pictures of the plants she recently dreamed. These plants are believed to be the herbs needed to cure Agnes’ unknown ailment. Angel’s receptivity to her grandmothers’ request is therefore not simply submission to authority, but a way to work together and secure the medicine needed to help the group. Without Angel’s dreams, the women would not be able to survive. While Angel’s quest ultimately fails since Agnes dies before she returns with the plants, the act of listening and responding to the needs of the group, of working together as “one animal” (177), demonstrates that Angel is willing

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to sacrifice her independence in order to survive together. In the treacherous waters of the Boundary Region, this collective mentality is the only way that the women might reach their goal of entering the land of the Fat Eaters and fighting the Canadian company, BEEVCO.

The project of forgoing one’s self-reliance in order to be self-reliant is best understood within the framework of Hogan’s ecofeminist project. Women who fail to integrate into their tribe and establish the kinship relations that will help them overcome their painful history end up being controlled by that history. Angel’s mother, Hannah, is one of the many female victims that Hogan presents to readers. Discovered on a log after a heavy storm, Hannah is adopted by Bush and taken into her home. Bush quickly realizes that the child is mentally disturbed, haunted by a traumatic past that has left its traces on her body. When Angel asks to hear stories of her mother’s childhood, she first learns of Hannah’s scars:

Beneath all the layers of clothes, her skin was a garment of scars. There were burns and incisions. Like someone had written on her. The signature of torturers, I call them now. I was overcome. I cried. She looked at me like I was a fool, my tears a sign of weakness. And farther in, I knew, there were violations and invasions of other kinds. What, I could only guess. (99)

Bush’s narrative identifies the physical traces of Hannah’s pain, and explains how

Hannah chose to respond to this pain by retreating from the tribal community. Bush relates how Hannah stole clothing and wore it like a body armor (98). Hannah also reenacts scenes of torture, molesting little children and murdering Bush’s dog: “There were needles in his mouth and nose and ears, and he’d been cut, the red blood on the fur, matted, one foot cut off” (104).

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The repetition of these acts of trauma isolates Hannah from the rest of her community. Hogan describes this as the result of the “naked ice inside her” (104).

Several Hogan scholars note that Hannah’s coldness is intended to associate her with the mythical Native American creature called the windigo, an icy monster that does not have the capacity to feel emotions such as love.9 This coldness freezes Hannah’s heart and makes it impossible for her to participate in the healing process that Hogan sees as dependent upon one’s ability to see oneself as part of a community.

Hogan attempts to find a middle path between the cold harshness of Hannah’s life and the dreaming and drifting that dominate the first leg of Angel’s journey to the land of the Fat Eaters. Like the male and female rain that occupies the narrative at alternating moments, Angel must also become hard at times in order to defend her way of life and the land that she has come to love. However, she must also avoid becoming so hard that her heart freezes like her mother’s before her. Angel must face several challenges in order to demonstrate her capacity to balance the hard and soft aspects of nature, becoming as valiant as any American Adam that came before her and as sensitive and compassionate as her American Eve predecessors. One of these challenges occurs when Angel must go and watch over her dying mother. Hardened by years of pain, Angel wants to remain distant from her mother so that she cannot hurt her again. Yet the stories told by Bush, Agnes, and Dora-Rouge have taught Angel that there is no benefit in holding in anger, and that it is far better to share and release pain.

As Angel watches her dying mother, she reflects:

9 See, for example, Laura Virginia Castor’s “Claiming Place in Wor(l)ds: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms,” Jill Fiore’s “Narrative as Landscape: A Home Beyond Boundaries in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms,” Theresa Smith’s “Landscape as Narrative: Traveling the Sacred Geography of the Anishinaabeg,” and Christine Jespersen’s “Unmapping Adventure: Sewing Resistance in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms.”

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I would find it in myself to love the woman who had given life to me, the woman a priest had called a miracle in reverse, the one who had opened her legs to men and participated in the same life-creating act as God. Yes, she tried to kill me, swallow me, consume me back into her own body, the way fire burns itself away, uses itself as fuel. But even if she hated me, there had been a moment of something akin to love, back at the creation. Her desperation and loneliness was my beginning. (251)

Hogan contrasts this scene with others where Angel must harden herself in order to defend her people and their land. As a group of construction workers threatens to destroy her family’s home in Two-Town, Angel is sent out into the woods to escape from the imminent danger posed by the men. Angered by this, Angel drives to the local police station and asks for help. Instead of finding aid, she is arrested for driving without a license in an unregistered car that the officer claims is stolen, despite the fact that he knows it belongs to Angel’s Uncle Tulik (291). Angel learns from this incident that she must harden to face the threats to her people and find ways of bringing attention to the dam project and working with the anti-dam activists.

The lessons that Angel learns throughout her journey are predicated on her ability to morph into a heroic figure. Hogan rejects many of the traits associated with the mythic American Adam. These dashing figures are enmeshed in the colonial ventures that “opened up” the land in the West. Used in order to justify westward expansion, these mythical heroes cover over the wounds suffered by Native American tribes.

Through the story of Angel, Hogan brings attention to this lost history. At the same time, she speaks directly to her Native readers, encouraging them to come together to overcome the trauma of their colonial past. The final lines in Solar Storms attest:

“Something beautiful lives inside us. You will see. Just believe it. You will see” (351).

Hogan is intent upon raising awareness of the atrocities of westward expansion, but also wants her readers to find ways to embrace the future. This desire is represented in

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Angel’s nickname, “Our Future,” a name that Angel’s family bestows upon Aurora,

Angel’s baby half-sister (318).10

Recovering one’s history in order to move beyond it is a defining trait of the

American Eve. O’Dell’s Karana must let go of her traumatic past in order to move forward and survive on her island alone. Hogan supplements O’Dell’s understanding of

Native history and brings her own unique perspective. In its engagement with the tropes of the American Adam, Hogan’s work thus expands beyond the framework O’Dell provides. Hogan’s American Eve is not only more fully developed, but the world she creates is also populated by a group of strong women that work together rather than in isolation. The changes Hogan makes to the American Eve dovetail with her interests in ecological conservation and Native rights. Crafting a story about a child lost in the U.S. foster care system, Hogan searches for a corrective to the cycles of violence that shape the lives of Native children and their parents, as well as the homes that have been lost, damaged, or stolen throughout U.S. history.

American Eve in Crisis: Aftereffects of 9/11

In her debut novel, Swamplandia! (2011), Karen Russell returns to the figure of the American Eve. Russell’s novel is similar to Hogan’s in that it features an adolescent girl who must journey through dangerous waters in order to overcome her internal conflict about the loss of her way of life. Russell also underscores the destruction of natural ecosystems and the culture of Native inhabitants. The optimism of Hogan’s emotionally battered heroine, however, is absent in Swamplandia!, a reflection of

10 As Silvia Schultermandl notes, the name Angel chooses for her sister, Aurora, also symbolizes the future, since Angel associates the aurora borealis with the spider webs in matrilineal creation stories from Native culture (79-80); the name thus embodies the tribe’s longing for a new future filled with hope and promise rather than pain and despair.

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American cynicism in the wake of the 2008 economic downturn. Drawing heavily upon the tropes of Herman Melville’s Fallen Adam, Russell celebrates innocence and mourns the loss of this innocence in the face of tragedy. While Russell manages to complicate this masculine version of the American Adam through her heroine’s achievements, these achievements are ultimately overshadowed by an overwhelming sense of despair that is rooted in her family’s inability to recover their failing business and the ultimate loss of their “native” land.

Russell’s novel begins deep in the Ten Thousand Islands on a local tourist site called Swamplandia! Home to the Bigtree family, Swamplandia! is just one of many islands located in the swamp. The difference is that this island is commercialized, built to take advantage of visitors’ interest in the exotic. The island is stocked with alligators that the family advertises as Seths, and the Bigtree family dresses up as Indians in order to further advertise their gator wrestling show. By beginning with the commercialized island—fake Indians and all—Russell draws attention to several real problems that have shaped the history of the Florida swamplands. Home to the

Seminole and Miccosukee Indians, the natural wetlands of Florida and their native inhabitants were threatened by white settlers during the land rush in the 1930s. Russell inserts many facts regarding this land rush through the youngest member of the Bigtree

“tribe,” Ava. With extraordinary proficiency, Ava reels off the many legends that constitute the Bigtree family history, including the story of how her Grandpa Sawtooth and Grandma Risa first arrived on Swamplandia!:

Grandpa Sawtooth and Grandma Risa took the train from Ohio to Florida and then traveled by glade skiff to their new home. When they first docked on the lee side of the island, my grandparents’ feet sank a few inches before touching the limestone bedrock. Sawtooth cursed the realtors for

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the length of an aria. A tiny crab scuttled over Risa’s high buttoned shoe— “and when she didn’t scream,” Sawtooth liked to say, “that’s when I knew we were staying.” (31)

Ava’s story describes the hopes and dreams that prompted many Northerners to settle in the Florida swamplands. Much like the American West, poor Americans flocked to the

Florida Everglades in an attempt to start anew. As Ava’s narrative indicates, men often initiated these ventures. It is Sawtooth who decides whether or not the couple stays, and his cursing the realtors suggests that he was also the one to first hear about the land deal, and the one who signed for the little plot of water-logged land. Moreover, the grandparents’ sinking feet reinforces the fact that for many the actual experience of life in Florida failed to live up to their expectations.

The dreams of prosperity that brought settlers like Sawtooth and Risa to the

Florida Everglades are also used to explain the rapid decline of the natural ecosystem.

Ava explains that several efforts to urbanize the wetlands and make them profitable ended up destroying their natural cycles. She complains about the melaleauca tree, which was planted in order to drain the swamp and make the land suitable for farming

(7-8). Ava also repeatedly returns to a story entitled the “Dredgeman’s Tale,” a ghost story about a young man named Louis Thanksgiving. The story describes the journey of a dredge deep into the Florida swamp; the purpose of the dredge was to build a superhighway down the Florida coastline, yet another venture aimed at making the swamp habitable.

In this respect, Russell echoes Hogan’s ecofeminist project. Russell’s novel is filled with vivid imagery that brings the swamp to life and helps build reader concern regarding the destruction of Florida’s natural ecosystem: “Water overflowed the sloughs and combed the black mudflats. Mangroves hugged soil and vegetation into pond-lily

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islands; gales tore the infant matter apart along the Gulf” (23). The swamp, Russell explains in this long passage describing the natural cycles of the Florida Everglades, is constantly changing in “land-versus-water skirmishes” (23). Ava identifies herself as a savior of this constantly changing landscape—indeed, her name derives from the

Hebrew word for “life”—which is threatened by the encroachment of mainlanders who seek to control the wild cycles of nature. For example, when completing a routine round of pesticide control, Ava explains how she is a “tree warrior,” who can fell the threatening melaleuca trees with one swoop of her pesticide-coated paint brush (77).

Russell’s interest in the development and destruction of the natural Florida ecosystem draws heavily upon the tropes of Herman Melville’s Fallen Adam. A hero that is battered and bruised until he, too, is tainted by the sin of the world, the Fallen Adam must fight the evil forces of the world in order to inject a little goodness in the hell that surrounds him. Ava, like her male predecessor, is forced to grow up and face a series of tragic events that eventually lead to her downfall. She begins her narrative by declaring that hers is the story of family tragedy, which she sums up in a few short words: “we fell”

(9). Ava also refers to her former self as a “child,” indicating that her tale ends in the loss of her childhood and the innocence associated with this stage of life (8). Russell uses Ava’s fall in order to delineate between a life before and after innocence. Much like the Biblical creation story, Ava’s tale follows the journey of a “young innocent” as she has her eyes opened to the troubling reality that shapes her present life.

As Lewis attests in his study of the American Adam, the Fallen Adam is characterized by his “ritualistic trials,” where he “takes his start outside the world, remote or on the verges; its power, its fashions, and its history are precisely the forces

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he must learn” (128). Lewis further defines the Fallen Adam as an “outsider,” who is

“morally prior to the world which nonetheless awaits them” (128-129). Lewis identifies this variant of the American Adam as especially significant to U.S. culture, for whenever it arises it speaks to “the American habit of resistance to maturity” (129). However, the conscious use of the Fallen Adam can also contribute to “fresh definition[s] of experience” that are signs of an emerging “cultural maturity” (129). In his analysis of

Melville’s work, Lewis shows how Melville’s heroes often reach a “moral maturity” through their encounters with evil (e.g., Ishmael and Ahab, Pierre and Elizabeth, and so forth) (140). Such encounters are a necessary step in the hero’s growing up process, and they help produce a “durable innocence” (146). Melville did not use the fall of his heroes in order to condemn innocence. While the great nineteenth-century author did see the “danger of innocence,” he also celebrated it and found ways to reaffirm its value

(148). Characters such as Billy Budd, the Christ-like adolescent hero from the novella of the same name, might therefore be destroyed by their innocence; but this innocent state is also necessary to make positive changes in the evil world: they are, Lewis claims,

“redeemer[s]” (151).

Russell’s Swamplandia!, while in part a critique of the colonial ventures that led to the destruction of the Florida Everglades and their native inhabitants, is also a paean to lost youth and the safety it represents. Russell uses Ava’s flashbacks to her life before the death of her mother to contrast life before and after Ava enters the world that

“awaits [her]” (Lewis 129). “Back when Mom was healthy,” Ava notes, “we’d see the flash of orange paint behind the mangroves that meant the ferry had arrived and go scrambling for our staff positions” (24). Ava recalls yet another moment when her

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mother comforts her after she makes a mistake on one of her alligator wrestling moves:

“A-va…now you tell me, is that the octave of a Bigtree wrestler?” (69). In contrast, Ava’s description of her life following her mother’s death is filled with grief and pain. She calls this period the “Beginning of the End” (8), and contributes the eventual loss of the family business and her lifestyle in the swamp to the death of her mother. “Without Mom,” Ava declares, “the show felt horribly incomplete to me” (20). Ava’s grief is rooted in her feelings that she has lost her place in the world. Previously an active member of the

Swamplandia! staff and her mother’s understudy, Ava now drifts around the island without a real sense of purpose.

The island of Swamplandia! is also described as a safe haven, a place of refuge from both the wilderness that extends beyond its borders and the concrete jungle of the mainland. Unlike the swamp, which lacks clear pathways and is filled with dangerous animals, Swamplandia! has “wood-chip[ped] trail[s]” and special tanks with “over three hundred thousand gallons of filtered water” to hold the park’s gators (46; 4). The scariest thing on the island, Ava confesses, is an old brown bear named Judy Garland, whose trick of “nod[ding] along to ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’” disturbs guests who believe the animal is having a seizure (7). Despite the fact that the island is filled with dangerous creatures, including a “rare Cuban crocodile” (7), the park feels safe because these animals are confined to tanks, cages, and an artificial lake called “the

Pit.” Indeed, the entire island is structured in order to manage the wilderness that might otherwise threaten its inhabitants.

Threats also come from the mainlanders that dwell in Loomis County. Ava notes that following her mother’s death a “new species” of tourists began to infest the once

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safe trails and buildings of the park: “Red-eyed men with no kids in tow started showing up at the Saturday shows. Solitaries. Sometimes they debarked the ferry with perfumed breath, already drunk” (20). These men, Ava continues, were often found “urinating on the side of our gift shop” or “throwing up into the bushes behind the museum” (21).

The relative safety of Swamplandia! and Ava’s isolation from mainland culture allows her to grow up in a bubble that preserves the traits of children most valued by adults. Ava remains uninformed about sexual desire and her language is cleaner than a fifth grader’s: the only person who swears in the Bigtree family is Ava’s brother, and even he only picks up this habit after moving to the mainland. Ava’s lack of knowledge about sexuality is made apparent when her older sister, Ossie, begins to “date” ghosts.

Ava is unable to understand that her sister’s moans and tossing around in her bed are not indications that her ghost boyfriends are attacking her. Ava’s brother informs her that in fact such behavior suggests that Ossie is having “a good dream” (72). Ava also foolishly flirts with a mysterious swamp gypsy known as the Bird Man, and will lie in his lap or hold his hand in order to feel the love that she associates with her parents (245-

246, 248). Her naivety also extends to her willingness to believe the lies that the Bird

Man tells her. When Ava’s sister leaves the island, Ava is readily convinced that the swamp is the entrance to the underworld as her sister told her, and this leads her to decide to leave the island with the Bird Man in order to pursue her sister.

These instances where Ava misreads the intentions or behaviors of others indicates the dangers inherent in innocence. As with Melville’s Fallen Adam, Ava’s innocence enmeshes her within a web of dangers, and she must forgo this innocence in order to overcome them. This occurs through the “ritualistic trials” that Lewis identifies

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as one of the key features of the Fallen Adam myth (128). In order to defeat the dark and mysterious Bird Man and survive the pulsing life of the swamp, Ava must first learn to see the world around her through the eyes of an experienced adult. She accomplishes this by channeling the voice of her mother: “Those men are alive,

Ava…You know they are,” Ava’s mother whispers in her ear (305). And later, after the

Bird Man violates her, her mother’s voice speaks more strongly than ever:

The Bird Man is just a man, honey. He is more lost out here than you are. The Bird Man has no idea where he’s taking you, and if he does, well that’s much worse, and you won’t find your sister anywhere near here, Ava, and I would run, honey, personally. (332)

The voice of her mother serves as Ava’s spiritual guide. Unlike Angel, who has several elders to guide her on her spiritual journey and teach her how to navigate the land, Ava is alone in the swamp. By imagining these conversations with her mother, Ava is able to find the strength she needs to let go of her childish innocence.

This transition from innocence to experience is symbolized in Ava’s dramatic escape scene, where she flings her genetically mutated red alligator into the face of the

Bird Man:

I pulled her out and untapped her small jaws and flung her at him in one fluid motion. The Bird Man was surprised into reflex. His naked hands flew out like catcher’s mitts; I could see past him to where his falconer’s gloves were hanging off the keel. He caught the Seth hard against his chest. There was something almost funny about watching this, hysterically funny, but terrifying, too, a bad hilarity that lights up eel-bright in your belly. A hideous squeal went up through the trees but I don’t know what happened next, if the red Seth bit him or clawed at him—I was off. (333)

The gator can be read as a reenactment of the rape scene that has just occurred; however, in this case the roles are reversed and Ava is in control. She flings the red gator, a symbol of her virginity, in the face of the Bird Man, and thus willingly parts with the thing that separates children from adolescents. Her willingness to place her baby

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alligator and favorite pet into danger symbolizes her willingness to disassociate herself from the “childish” behavior that linked her to life on Swamplandia!. The “hideous squeal” that Ava hears further supports the notion that the sacrifice of her alligator represents the loss of innocence. The squeal can be read both as the sound of attack and the squelching, writhing squeal of pain that one might associate with a dying animal.11

In addition to being associated with the red blood of a first sexual experience,

Ava’s Seth is also named after the Egyptian god who kills his brother Osiris, god of the underworld. Ava, who up until this time has accepted the Bird Man’s lies about the swamp being the underworld, now fights her childish desire to believe these tales. In ancient Egyptian mythology, Seth kills his brother and chops him up; this violent imagery is fitting as Ava, too, dismembers her fantasy of the swamp and begins to accept the truth about it. Osiris, the brother that Seth murders, is also known as a fertility god; since Seth is associated with the infertile desert, their conflict can also be read as a battle between infertility and fertility. Ava thus flings the infertile Seth at the seed-spreading Bird Man in an attempt to suck him dry and destroy him.

Although this initial escape symbolizes Ava’s disavowal of her innocence, she must still complete a number of other ritualistic trials in her journey towards maturity.

The first of these involves the conflict between Ava and a mythological woman named

Mama Weeds. Mama Weeds is a ghost from Florida folklore, who haunts little children and other swamp dwellers. A black woman who fled to the swamp to gain freedom,

Mama Weeds was later brutally murdered by the men in the area who were jealous of

11 The novel is also filled with Biblical imagery. In this particular passage, the red alligator’s demise brings to mind the slaughter of the innocents in Egypt at the order of King Herod. The gator’s squeal thus brings to mind the cry of the infant in this mass episode of infanticide.

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her success. Ava explains, “Most people believe it [the murder] was the work of several men, owing to the kind of damage that they reputedly did to her. For no other reason than that she’d killed that alligator and let it rot!” (361). Mama Weeds represents the violated female body, a woman wronged by greedy men. Having survived her traumatic sexual encounter with the Bird Man, Ava’s encounter with a woman that she believes is the ghost of this violated female body signals the difficulty of letting go of her pain, her past, and her innocence. Ava clings to a set of clothes that she recognizes as possessions of her loved ones, including her beloved mother, and “snarls” like a “rabid animal” at the ghostly woman, whose eyes are a portal to “the islands, the saw-grass prairies” of the swamp (363-364). Ava’s regression into an animal state links her to the savagery of the feral child. Ava’s fighting instinct—her scratching, clawing, and snarling—demonstrate the extent to which she values the memories linked to her childhood. The one scrap of clothing that she rips from the dress of the ghost is thus representative of the lost youth that she turned her back on in her desperate escape from the Bird Man.

Ava’s final trial occurs when she enters a cave that is home to a female alligator.

The entrance to the cave represents Ava’s entrance into a maternal world. The cave is womblike—dark, round, and enclosed—and it is also the home of the nesting female gator. Moreover, the cave is part of Seminole and Miccosukee mythology. A native creation myth story tells of the Indian people’s emergence from a cave:

The ground shakes and the opening to the cave is exposed - the People slowly walk to the opening and look out onto a strange new place - this is the Mother that had been created for them - but the cave represented security - as a child can not resist the calling of birth the People could not resist the calling of the new place. The cave now gave birth to the People -

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new life stepped onto the breast of Mother - a beautiful new beginning was at hand. (“Hitchiti-Mikasuki Creation Story”)

Ava’s “new beginning” can only occur once she returns to the cave. In the cave, she must wrestle with another monstrous maternal figure, and it is here that she can finally let go of her past, symbolically represented by the clothes she carries in her arms.

Weighed down by her sister’s skirt and blouse and the scrap of clothing she believes was her mother’s dress, Ava begins to drown in the birth water of the cave. These incidents signal yet again the potential dangers of innocence, as the security that the cave represents in the Seminole and Miccosukee Indian creation myth is inverted. While the cave does protect Ava from her male predator, it also has its own set of risks.

The climactic battle in the cave is filled with vivid imagery and laden with symbolic meaning. As she swims through the gator’s den, Ava describes how she pushes through a natural obstruction, a “portal, a hole” that she at first believes is a wall

(382). This portal can be likened to the birth canal, which Ava desperately seeks to pass through in her efforts to return to the womb of her creation. As she nears her goal, she spies the alligator. “The thing,” Ava calmly reflects, “had gotten ahold of my calf” (382-

383). Russell inserts vivid visual imagery in the wrestling scene in order to underscore the pain associated with Ava’s rebirth: “Dark orange pigment rose everywhere and soon it was too cloudy to see, although I tried—my eyes stung inside a fog that I realized must be plumes of my own blood” (383). Ava further describes the experience of the alligator bite in this way:

Petals of red pain shot through me until my ribs ached, the agonizing pressure expanding in my chest, as round as a sky, and I began to rise like one bubble in a chain. My skin, I thought, is coming apart…. (383)

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As Ava swims to the surface of the cave, her old body literally falls apart. In an earlier passage, she notes how her skin is peeling away from sun exposure (342), and here she repeats this visual image in order to capture the feeling of renewal associated with the wrestling scene. Ava is able to channel her memories of her mother and use them to move forward. Rather than be weighed down by the past, she lets go of the symbolic burden of her mother and sister’s clothes, a sign that she is entering the final stages of grief and is ready to move forward in her life. In classic American Eve style, Ava reaches hero status by confronting her past and embracing a new future.

Such a breathtaking ending raises the question of why Russell’s American Eve fails to live up to the standards of Hogan’s earlier female hero. The difference lies in the ending each author chooses. While Ava overcomes her haunting past and survives her tussle with the female alligator, her story lacks the hope that is so evident in the final chapters of Solar Storms. For instance, in her final triumphant speech, Angel exclaims that “something wonderful lives inside me” (351). This statement is both a tribute to her personal growth and a message aimed at Hogan’s Native readers, whose lives may also be controlled by feelings of shame. Ava’s narrative, however, lacks this affirmative message. After returning to her family and losing Swamplandia!—a loss that parallels

Angel’s loss of her native lands as a result of the BEEVCO project—Ava laments the recent changes in her life:

Ossie and I attended public school in the fall where they made us wear uniforms in the dull sepias and dark crimsons of fall leaves, these colors that were nothing like the fire of my alligator’s skin. But things can be over in horizontal time and just beginning in your body, I’m learning. Sometimes the memory of that summer feels like a spore in me, a seed falling through me. Kiwi is sympathetic, but Ossie is the only one who I can really talk about this descent. (395)

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Ava’s description contrasts the dullness of her mainland life with the vividness of her time on Swamplandia! The same muted colors of her school uniform are associated with the season of fall, a time of death and change as the cold weather begins to set in.

The selection of this particular season further cements the depiction of Ava’s new life as a fall rather than a rising up. Indeed, Ava declares that she understands this moment as the beginning of an end, or a “descent.” Comparing her memory to a “spore” also carries negative connotations, since unlike seeds for vegetative plants, a spore is associated with bacteria, fungi, and other forms of plant life associated with rot and decay.

Ava’s catastrophic fall represents a larger trend in contemporary American fiction. While many new novels, such as Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (2012), Bonnie

Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River (2011), and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones

(2011), present strong female protagonists that bear many of the distinctive traits of the

American Eve figure, they are also destined for a terrible fall. The inevitable destruction of these female heroes due to obstacles such as pregnancy and rape are ironic considering each authors’ desire to break from the traditional tropes of the adventure story. Jespersen notes that the adventure story is typically considered a male domain: not only are the authors typically men, but their protagonists are usually male youth setting out into the world for the first time (276-277). The identification of this new crop of American Eves as fallen women suggests a more cynical outlook concerning plots for national expansion in terms of land and the potential for women to become part of the traditional male adventure. Indeed, in contrast to Ron Charles’s assertion that the

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above-mentioned set of novels features “fiercely independent girls,”12 the journey of these female characters indicates that adventure is so toxic as to destroy the prospects of each respective novel’s heroine. Each heroine, that is, either loses their independence at the end of their journey or dies trying to retain it. As I will go on to show, the changes occurring in the American Eve figure dovetail with a very different literary figure, that of the virgin girl. Rooted in the virgin land myth that was revived by

American studies founder Henry Nash Smith during the 1950s, the virgin girl bears a striking resemblance to the American Eve at her lowest point, the moments at which she is “beaten, shot, betrayed, [and/or] abandoned” (Lewis, American Adam 128).

12 Charles is actually reviewing Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, but he touches on the relationship between this book and the other set of novels that I mention here.

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CHAPTER 4 FROM VIRGIN LAND TO VIRGIN GIRL: NATURE, NOSTALGIA, AND AMERICAN EMPIRE

Here was a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated.

—Frederick Jackson Turner, 1896 Virgin Land1

If the American Eve is an attempt for authors to recognize the role women have played in the formation of the United States, then the virgin girl figure represents the havoc that men have wreaked on the land. Both myths concern themselves with aspects of westward expansion, particularly with the male explorers who colonized the land beyond the frontier line; but it is the virgin land myth that deals exclusively with the land loss that resulted from these early pioneer efforts. The figure of the virgin girl, a literary reincarnation of the original virgin land myth, returns to many of the same issues that resulted from the U.S.’s expansion policies during the nineteenth century as well as the lasting impact of these policies on Native peoples. As the name “virgin girl” implies, the girls that appear in novels concerned with the virgin land myth draw upon the very same ideological constructions that made the original myth so powerful—that is, they understand women as weak and vulnerable, pure and innocent, beautiful and alluring. If a grown woman is perceived to have these traits by the men who desire her, then all the more so for the young girls that populate these narratives. Like the “mother” figure that

Annette Kolodny describes in relation to the land (The Lay of the Land 22), these girls

1 The epigraph to this chapter was originally from an undocumented speech given by Frederick Jackson Turner. It appears in his chapter, “The Myth of the Garden and Turner’s Frontier Hypothesis,” on page 254.

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are seen as taboo.2 To desire the virgin and to act on that desire is nothing less than scandalous.

The virgin girl differs from the American Eve in other respects as well. Drawing upon the original associations with the virgin land myth, the virgin girl is often associated with nature, imperial conquest, and nostalgia. As Henry Nash Smith suggests in his

1950 study, the virgin land myth revolves around these very same issues. Smith charts the way in which the land beyond the frontier was first imagined as a lush paradise akin to the Garden of Eden, and later as a prim and proper garden, perfect for farmers prepared to homestead and make a fortune off the fertile soil. In an effort to further develop these images of the West as a land of opportunity, Americans created tales about explorers, mountaineers, and other male figures who first charted and later settled these sparsely populated areas. Such men emerged as leaders and protectors, who could guide those less capable through the wilderness and past the threats that it harbored. In contrast to the male figures in Smith’s study, the virgin girl reveals the perspective of those most deeply impacted by the virgin land myth: Native Americans.

The virgin land myth, as my brief synopsis demonstrates, is a narrative that contributed to the power of white, male colonizers. Ultimately, it allowed U.S. citizens to justify westward expansion (i.e., colonization of Native lands) in order to expand their empire and increase the prosperity of the young nation. The primary purpose of the virgin girl figure is to dismantle the very myth that perpetuated the denial of U.S. citizens regarding westward expansion. While there is some acknowledgement of the U.S.

2 Kolodny notes that the land was often described as a woman, and more specifically a mother: this mother-land cared for her children and provided for their needs. To disturb the balance between mother and child by attempting to collect more power constituted nothing short of incest.

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government’s transgression of Native rights and the failure to uphold treaties, these concessions are often limited.

This chapter charts the development of the virgin girl figure through three case studies. While certainly not exhaustive, my examples demonstrate the way in which this particular figure allowed U.S. citizens from the second-half of the twentieth century to the present to unravel the very myth that captured Smith’s attention for over twenty years, and which ultimately led to the publication of Virgin Land. Using Smith’s definition and description of the virgin land myth as a guide, I explore the way that nature, empire, and nostalgia—the three defining traits of the virgin land myth according to Smith— converge in this modern female figure. Just like her real-life counterpart, the virgin girl is due to her young age “off limits” for male adults, and it is this very taboo that renders her both desirous and exotic. Drawing upon literary, educational, psychological, and political ideas regarding girlhood, the authors examined in this chapter formulate scenarios that parallel the colonizer and colonized relationship between the United

States and Native Americans. This is evident in the virgin girl’s frequent inability to speak for herself, as well as the abuse that she suffers at the hands of her male companions. Drawing upon the U.S.’s colonial history, authors question the assumptions inherent in the nation’s national mythology, and insist that power dynamics that perpetuate values and narratives that privilege the few while disempowering the many must be abolished. Such counter narratives are not inherently anti-American; rather, they seek to find ways to accept past wrongs in search of a better future.

What further marks each of my examples is a shared investment in the Cold War interpretations of the virgin land myth. Much like my previous chapter, each author is

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responding to the specific political climate that emerged in the 1950s and that continues to impact U.S. citizens. It is no coincidence, for example, that Louise Erdrich’s The

Plague of Doves (2008), a novel that engages with post-9/11 desires for vengeance, is set in the 1960s, a time when many Native Americans began fighting for civil rights and combating Cold War policies that left them even more disempowered than they had been previously. Nor is it an accident that Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 hit, The Virgin

Suicides, returns to small town suburbia, a hallmark image of 1950s family life that underwent substantial criticism in later years. These scenarios put the “cold” in Cold

War, for they are indeed dark, desperate, and horrifying places for the characters that live in them. While the ability to navigate the cultural expectations and social limitations of these societies varies for each girl, the pattern suggests the depth of each author’s political awareness, and a shared concern with the U.S.’s rise to a position of global power. The virgin girl therefore becomes a potent figure for those concerned with the

U.S.’s former land policies and the continued mistreatment of Native peoples, a history that further hints at the dark possibilities as the U.S. rapidly widened its global influence following World War II.

Despite the bleak nature of the novels that appear in this chapter, they also share a sense of possibility. The girls that appear in these stories demonstrate that, while beaten, those who suffer most are not necessarily destroyed. Moreover, it suggests that in order to rectify the wrongs of the past we must first shatter the myths created to cover over these wrongs. While these fictional girls do not always survive, it is their acts that allow them to regain control over their lives and ultimately dismantle the myths that surround them. The girls not only act out but speak out, challenging male authority and

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causing readers to question the very narratives that they have come to accept. Even though there are distinct differences that distinguish the virgin girl figures that appear here, it is the authors’ shared investment in dismantling the virgin land myth that brings them together.

From Virgin Land to Virgin Girl

In his 1955 classic, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov captures the fears of the Cold War generation through the taboo romance of a middle-aged man and an adolescent girl.

First published in Paris in 1955, literary critics quickly interpreted Lolita as a critique of

American culture after its release in the United States in 1958.3 Nabokov, who was deeply familiar with the “New World” as a result of several road trips with his wife Véra, drew inspiration from the natural topography of the American West and the myths associated with it when crafting Humbert Humbert’s dream girl. Lolita is tall, with long brown limbs and dark eyes, and a honey-colored midriff that makes Humbert sizzle with sexual desire. Moreover, she appears for the first time in the backyard garden of

Charlotte Haze, a link to Humbert’s past love, Annabel, but also an expression of

Lolita’s grounding in an earthly garden. Lolita’s connection to nature infuses her with sexual potency, making her as desirable as the apple in the story of Adam and Eve.

Additionally, her status as a young virgin is a final connection to the virgin land myth that

Smith identifies in his work and Kolodny later critiques. Nabokov draws upon this myth in order to present a critique of 1950s US culture —admittedly a critique he never acknowledged was present in Lolita—4 This myth is both culturally and historically specific, drawing upon the same psychological and literary tropes that informed the

3 As Pierre Berton notes in an interview with Nabokov, critics claim that Lolita is “a joke on our national cant about youth” and “a cutting exposé of chronic American adolescence and shabby materialism.” 4 For more about the historical allusions in Lolita, see Susan Mizruchi’s “Lolita in History” (2003).

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work of myth-symbol scholars.

Nabokov’s selection for his novel’s subject matter a taboo romance between a grown man and a prepubescent child immediately associates him with the myth-symbol scholars, particularly those who claimed the United States must “grow up” and mature.

Fiedler, one of the more active participants in the “beyond innocence” debate, made the most forceful claims concerning the issue of American immaturity. In Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Fiedler claims that a “‘boyish’ theme recurs with especial regularity in American fiction,” in which a young male protagonist sets forth in the wilderness with the aide of an older male companion (181). While Fiedler actually spends very little time considering the role of the child in US literature,5 he does support his thesis that US literature has featured protagonists in a state of arrested development, that, in short, the characters (primarily men) are stuck in a permanent state of boyhood. Fiedler’s insistence that US literature is in the midst of a crisis parallels the anxiety present in Lolita. Trapped as a result of his unrequited love for

Annabel, Humbert is unable to move beyond his adolescent love and continues to be thwarted in his attempts to foster socially sanctioned adult relationships.

While Lolita’s discussion of incest is disturbing for many readers, it presents a narrative of maturation, albeit a brutal and forced one, that parallels the concerns of

1950s scholars. Lolita is only twelve when Humbert becomes a lodger at the Haze household, and the novel ends when she is seventeen. During this time, Lolita both

5 While I doubt Fiedler would have anticipated this use of his argument, Gillian Avery, in the first comprehensive history of US children’s literature, adopts Fiedler’s definition of the good bad boy as a way of explaining the bad boy movement in literature, which began with the publication of Henry Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy (1869). Cases such as Avery’s serve as interesting moments of crossover, where American studies scholarship actually helps to legitimate field of children’s literature. It is only now that American studies scholars are starting to really band together and consider what children’s literature might be able to do for them.

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physically and mentally matures. When Humbert first meets her, he wonders if she has experienced “the Mystery of the Menarche” (47). The answer to his question is revealed shortly after Humbert has sex with Lolita for the first time: “Presently, making a sizzling sound with her lips, she started complaining of pains, said she could not sit, said I had torn something inside her” (141). As Robert Levine notes, Lolita is experiencing the pains common during a woman’s menstrual cycle, an observation supported by the fact that not long after Humbert purchases “sanitary pads” along with other items for his moody charge (472). In addition to physically maturing, Lolita must also learn how to outwit Humbert in order to extricate herself from her terrible situation. As Lolita matures she grows increasingly crafty. Not only does she find friends and collaborators like her sexually experienced friend Mona, she finds ways to manipulate Humbert. Money, Lolita

(and later Humbert) realizes, is a path towards freedom. Lolita takes advantage of

Humbert’s dependency on her and manages to turn sexual favors into opportunities for earning money.6 When Humbert discovers Lolita’s cash, she finds better ways to hide her money from her intrusive guardian.

As a consequence of her duplicitous nature, later Nabokov scholars debate the extent of Lolita’s culpability for her misfortunes. For instance, in her well-known essay on Lolita and the woman reader, Sarah Herbold suggests that Lolita is not merely a passive participant in sexual games that occur between her and Humbert but rather an initiator of them: “Lolita…is also not only a sexy creature, but also as sophisticated and wily as Humbert” (80). Herbold scandalously proposes that even before Humbert consummates their relationship, Lolita gains equal amounts of sexual pleasure from

6 Her actions, while clearly intended to suggest Lolita is like a prostitute, also pervert the middle-class invention of the allowance.

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their interactions: “Because she seems to be a mere girl and a mere character, [Lolita] gets to have fun at less risk and cost to herself, and at greater expense to Humbert”

(82).

Herbold is not the only critic to have little sympathy with Lolita. Page Stegner, for example, declares that Lolita is a “rather common, unwashed little girl whose interests are entirely plebian, though, in certain respects, precocious” (114). Leland de la

Durantaye, on the other hand, challenges the claims of unsympathetic scholars, urging readers to recall that Lolita is terribly unhappy during her three year road trip with

Humbert, something that Humbert himself reveals when he confesses that Lolita “sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep” (176). De la

Durantaye proposes that scholars are able to ignore this quote for two reasons: they insist that Lolita is not innocent; and they turn Lolita into a symbol for something else

(180).

De la Durantaye’s critique is telling in that it strikes upon an important aspect of the narrative: Humbert’s dependence on myth. Much invested in the idea of Lolita, it is

Humbert far more than Nabokov who wants readers to forget that she is in fact a real child. He often speaks for Lolita and avoids considering her feelings, much more interested in his own desire and his fantasy of their forbidden love. Indeed, his first description of the child turns her into a fantastic mythical creature: the nymphet. Having just bombarded his reader with his academic credentials, Humbert gives a full description of the nymphet:

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.” (16)

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Vladimir Alexandrov notes that Humbert’s choice of demoniac as a clarification is no accident, as it is meant to refer to the “realm of the demoniac,” or “a realm somewhere between the divine and the mortal” (qtd. in Durantaye 191).

Nabokov’s construction of a middle-aged European well-versed in psychology and literature (Humbert has a degree in English literature) allows him to incorporate popular 1950s myths into his novel. Specifically the virgin land myth enables Nabokov to complicate an already complex text further by alluding to US imperial power during the Cold War. It was in 1941 that Henry Luce published his famous essay calling for the

US to intervene in the “European war” (that is, World War II) and named the twentieth century the “American century” (61-65). The belief in American exceptionality was a staple of Cold War rhetoric. As many postcolonial theorists have noted, the relationship between colonizers and the colonized is often described as a paternal one, where the colonizer/father benevolently aids the colonized/children in the ruling of their nation’s domestic affairs. Using this parent-child metaphor, empires justify the colonization of other nations, since these nations are deemed incapable of governing themselves. This very same mentality was adopted during the Cold War, as the US government attempted to remake the world in its own image.

Myth-symbol scholarship was the academy’s contribution to the US’s fight for global dominance. Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan note in their studies of US imperialism that some in the university collaborated with the US government in developing a Cold War rhetoric that supported the nation’s interests abroad. Pease writes:

The vast majority of the scholars working within the field of American studies cooperated with policymakers and the press in constructing a

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mythology of national uniqueness out of whose narrative themes US citizens constructed imaginary relations to the cold war state. (11)

Kaplan adds that the US emerged as a new kind of imperial power that challenged

European models of imperialism (“‘Left Alone with America’” 17). In her seminal essay,

“‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture”

(1993), Kaplan argues that prominent myth-symbol scholars drew upon their adventures abroad in order to redefine their world back home. Myth-symbol scholars like Miller and

Lewis refashioned their experiences so that they conformed to the heroic model of the frontier tale (9), accounts where a lone white male stands nobly alone. Such tales were the cornerstone of fantasies about American exceptionalism.

Nabokov’s relationship to the academy suggests the plausibility of reading Lolita in relation to myth-symbol scholarship. Nabokov began his teaching career in 1941 at

Wellesley College. Hired to teach comparative literature, Nabokov would eventually found the college’s department of Russian literature, of which he was the only member.

In Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991), Brian Boyd describes this period in

Nabokov’s life as plagued with writing challenges. Due to the popularity of his courses,

Nabokov often had trouble finding time for his literary pursuits (Boyd 170). In speaking of the long gestation period for Lolita, Nabokov asserts, “I found it no longer physically possible to combine scientific research with lectures, belles-lettres, and Lolita (for she was on her way—a painful birth, a difficult baby)” (Speak, Memory 47). The constant tension between Nabokov’s teaching and writing careers reveals the extent to which

Nabokov immersed himself in academic culture. Furthermore, his founding of Wellesley

College’s Russian department during the McCarthy era is no mere coincidence; rather, it marks the emerging interest in Russian culture in an effort to protect US interests, a

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development that might be likened to the increased interest in Arabic culture in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. If Nabokov was not directly working with myth-symbol scholars, he was likely well-aware of the nation’s political interest in the university.

However, Nabokov returns to the original features of Smith’s virgin land myth in order to turn myth-symbol scholarship on its head and critique 1950s Cold War culture.

He begins by infusing his work with popular psychological beliefs regarding female adolescence and using these as a way to link Lolita to the primitivism Smith originally associated with his male heroes. As I noted earlier, Humbert refers to Lolita as

“demoniac,” reminding readers that psychologists have long considered the teenage girl to be monstrous. A girl’s sexual development is an uncomfortable topic for early developmental psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall and Havelock Ellis. Much of this discomfort stems from the fact that psychologists traditionally used the girl as a point of reference for male development. While young boys go through various stages, including a “feminine stage” and a “savage stage,” girls remain relatively unchanged as they grow into mature womanhood. These myths of development held an enormous amount of power over psychologists, even when there was sufficient evidence to disprove them.

Crista DeLuzio notes in her excellent study of the girl in child psychology that

“reconciling the concepts of femininity and adolescence,” the latter being a male construct, was the primary difficulty faced by psychologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (2).

By naming Lolita “demoniac,” Humbert attempts to freeze her development; but as readers of Lolita know, Lolita is constantly changing and moving away from her state

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of nymphethood. In contrast to psychological myths regarding female development,

Nabokov introduces the feral tale in order to draw yet another connection between Lolita and cultural primitivism. Popularized through such famous case studies as the Wolf

Man, the feral tale is about maturation gone awry. More specifically, it is about children who grow up outside of society and the affects that this has on their development. One of the earliest cases of a feral child was the “wild child” Victor. First discovered by a local Frenchman in Aveyron, the French government moved Victor to Paris for scientific study and placed him into the custody of Dr. Gaspard Itard, who was charged with the task of determining if the child could be socialized. Victor eventually escaped from his

French captors, but remained a popular example in the nature versus nurture debates.

Kenneth Kidd explains that cases like Victor are only one of several iterations of the feral tale (87-88). Literary descriptions of wild children, including Rudyard Kipling’s The

Jungle Book (1894) and Kim (1901), use the feral tale as a way of defending the colonial project. Kipling and other white authors depict colonized subjects like Kim as savage, and then suggest that these unruly children need a firm authority to oversee them. The US version of these tales includes the “street rats” of New York City, most of whom were boys. While the girl rarely figures in the feral tale, a few popular cases of feral girls did gain national attention, including the girl called Genie by scientists (Kidd

206-207).

Lolita’s appearance and behavior make her a literary descendent of the “wild” street child. In Horatio Alger’s Tattered Tom (1871), the only book in his series fiction with a female protagonist, the narrator describes the eponymous hero in the following manner: “The child’s face was very dark and, as might be expected, dirty; but it was

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redeemed by a pair of brilliant black eyes, which were fixed upon the young exquisite half-humorous, half-defiant, as the owner promptly retorted, ‘You’re another!’” (10). As is typical of Alger’s heroes, the child has some physically redeeming features that attract prospective benefactors, in this case her “brilliant black eyes.” Tom’s ragged appearance and course behavior are not so different from Lolita. On multiple occasions

Humbert comments on Lolita’s hygiene, noting, for example, “Although I do love that intoxicating brown fragrance of hers, I really think she should wash her hair once in a while” (43). He declares her speech “vulgar,” comprised of words that include

“revolting,” “super,” “luscious,” “goon,” and “drip” (65). Despite the coarseness and the grimy limbs, Humbert cannot resist Lolita’s underlying childish beauty. He adds that “all this gets mixed up with the exquisite stainless tenderness seeping through the musk and the mud, through the dirt and the death, oh God, oh God” (44).

The use of psychological myths like the feral tale in an American setting provides a racial undertone to the text. Race, as many Cold War scholars have noted, was a delicate topic for the US government. Interested in winning over recently decolonized nations to democracy, yet still plagued by racism at home, the US struggled to present an image of itself that would satisfy its ambitions abroad while still appeasing racist policymakers and citizens back home. The entanglement of the domestic and the foreign in cases such as the US involvement in Vietnam signaled what Amy Kaplan calls the “anarchy of empire,” or the “breakdown or defiance of the monolithic system of order that empire aspires to impose on the world, an order reliant on clear divisions between metropolis and colony, colonizer and colonized, national and international spaces, the domestic and the foreign” (Anarchy of Empire 13).

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Race was mostly ignored by 1950s myth-symbol scholars. Nabokov utilizes myth to address this silence, bringing to the forefront issues regarding domestic and foreign politics debated during the Cold War. Lolita’s brown body and her natural aptitude for physical activity, for example, can be read as a reference to the nation’s mythic savage, the Native American. A popular figure in early twentieth-century literature, Native

Americans were often idealized and depicted as the “Vanishing American.” Kidd writes that Native Americans represented the kind of “indigenous, masculine Americanism” that was popular in literary works such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking series (101). Native Americans were also the victims of US expansion, a fact that the myth of the virgin land attempts to repress.

Nabokov further connects Lolita to Native American culture through her choice of brown moccasins (174, 187, 208).7 She also begs Humbert to purchase little trinkets from a souvenir shop selling Native American wares (148). In portraying Lolita as an exotic brown body, Nabokov hints at the unseemly aspects of US empire. This motif also positions Humbert as the colonizer. Perry Nodelman remarks in his essay on colonization in children’s literature that adults often treat children like colonial subjects

(29). Lolita is certainly cast into this double role of helpless child and colonial subject.8

Because Humbert relies on commonly held assumptions about both the child and

7 I say Nabokov here rather than Humbert because Humbert never makes this connection, which is evident because he does associate another character, Jean Farlow, with Native Americans. Upon first meeting Jean, Humbert comments, “she was handsome in a carved-Indian sort of way” (104).

8 Clare Bradford critiques Nodelman’s application of postcolonial theory to children’s literature (7). Most importantly, she argues, Nodelman ignores how race affects children’s experience of the world around them. Nodelman, as so many scholars before him, therefore begins from the assumption that all children enjoy the privileges of white, middle class living. Moreover, the fact that many children have in fact lived under colonial rule distinguishes their experience from those who have never experienced such conditions. In the case of Lolita, her condition as sexual chattel places her in a power relationship that parallels that of colonizer and colonized more strongly than the child in Nodelman’s essay. The racialization of her body also hints at her otherness and challenges the white privilege that a girl of her age and status would normally enjoy.

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the colonial subject, Lolita’s suffering is rendered invisible for much of the narrative. Her identity is mutable as she takes on the roles of orphan, Native American, and monstrous adolescent. Silence, of course, is one of the main techniques that colonizers use to reinforce their beliefs about the other. Not allowing the other to speak makes it easier to believe in the radical difference between the other and the self. Lolita’s cries are easily overlooked when compared to the authoritative voice of Humbert. Yet Nabokov constructs his narrative in such a way that Lolita does manage to make her voice heard.

Her cutting remarks about her relationship with Humbert help dissolve the fantasy of the romantic couple. In one passage, Lolita sarcastically refers to Humbert as “Dad” (112), and in another she retorts, “I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me” (141).

Since Humbert always filters Lolita’s words, often dismissing these attacks by referring to her moody nature, it is easy to ignore these verbal assaults. However, Nabokov finds other ways to lend Lolita the power she needs to counteract Humbert’s intoxicating myths, most notably through bodily illness.

Nabokov incorporates scenes of sexual conquest that remind readers of the rape of the natural landscape during US westward expansion, and the exploitation of Native peoples. Perhaps the most explicit allusion to US colonization of Native Americans is the scene where Lolita develops a serious illness and has to go to the hospital. At first

Humbert resists relinquishing his control over her; however, ultimately he is unable to ignore the bodily signs of her illness:

Hysterical little nymphs might, I knew, run up all kinds of temperatures— even exceeding a fatal count. And I would have given her a sip of hot spiced wine, and two aspirins, and kissed the fever away, if, upon an examination of her lovely uvula, one of the gems of her body, I had not seen that it was a burning red. I undressed her. Her breath was bittersweet. Her brown rose tasted of blood. She was shaking from head

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to toe. She complained of a painful stiffness in the upper vertebrae—and I thought of poliomyelitis as any American parent would. Giving up all hope of intercourse, I wrapped her up in a laprobe and carried her into the car. (240)

Humbert presents himself as the concerned parent, but his final statement that he must

“giv[e] up all hope of intercourse” exposes him as the rapist. Like Humbert’s acknowledgement of his real relationship to Lolita, his descriptions of her feverish body also expose Lolita’s suffering. Humbert neglects her pain until it reaches an inhuman level—as Humbert notes, a nymph’s fever can often reach a “fatal count.” Moreover,

Humbert’s selection of “brown rose” to describe Lolita’s genitals is a variation of one of his pet names for her, “brown flower,” referring to Lolita’s suntanned skin (151). By alluding to his earlier use of the pet name, Humbert recalls Lolita’s association with

Native American women, who, like Lolita, suffered at the hands of colonizers. Like the

“Vanishing American,” Lolita disappears shortly after this, but not before revealing the harm done to her by Humbert’s repeated violations. The repetition of the color red and the explicit mention of blood breaks the spell of Humbert’s myth and reveals the violence of his conquest. In this moment, Lolita, the mythical virgin girl, aligns with the

US myth of the virgin land, and reveals that both myths are really shams.

Lolita’s vanishing act in the hospital scene is just one of many moments that instill panic in Humbert, who dreads losing power over his ward. Yet her vanishing and subsequent reappearance as a grown woman also compels Humbert to consider the nostalgia that Lolita evokes for him. Nostalgia, a term that is broken down into its etymological roots of “longing” and “return home,” is often associated with a visceral sickness brought on by one’s longing for a lost object, especially one’s homeland. While

Humbert’s longing can easily be associated with his nostalgia for pre-war Europe and

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his lost love, Annabel, scenes of nostalgia are also directed specifically at Nabokov’s

US audience. These scenes invoke images of the American landscape in the few places where one might still discover the beauty of the untamed countryside.

Recapturing the allure of the West, these rural scenes evoke Americans’ longing for the very same past of American heroes like Daniel Boone and Leatherstocking. They are spaces, moreover, that sharply contrast with the material culture that Lolita adores and

Humbert despises, a world of commodities that 1950s Americans would find all too familiar.

There are two scenes in particular that capture the nostalgia for the American past. The first is when Humbert attempts to make love to Lolita outdoors. This outing is cut short when Humbert discovers a pair of children with “unblinking dark eyes” observing his and Lolita’s naked bodies (169). Humbert nevertheless interprets this moment as one of beauty, worthy of reflection and nostalgia:

The disappointment I must now register…should in no wise reflect on the lyrical, epic, tragic but never Arcadian American wilds. They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. (168)

A few lines later Humbert bemoans the same wild beauty he has praised, concluding that the combination of “poisonous plants,” “nameless insects,” and “potential snakes” all make outdoor frolics with Lolita impossible (168). Humbert’s land is therefore identified with his mistress: both are beautiful and dangerous at the same time. Indeed, his first description of the land, with its “wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender,” could just as easily be a description of Lolita.

Humbert’s display of affection and subsequent disillusionment with the “American wilds” returns readers to the scenes of the West made familiar through stories of

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Western heroes. In a time of revived popular interest in these tales —stories that were valued for their ability to allegorically allude to the US’s struggle with Communism and secure a vision of the world in which the US is always victorious (Engelhardt 70-71)— the reference to the untamed wilderness of the American West would not be lost on

Nabokov’s 1950s readers. What Nabokov does, however, is to insert the “bad guy” in place of the noble American hero. The substitution of the villain for the hero destabilizes the myth of the virgin land, placing the innocence of this lauded space into question.

Even Humbert acknowledges the “poison” that peppers the land. His acknowledgement of the poison, coupled with the act of defiling the young Lolita, short-circuits the readers’ fantasy of a pre-industrialized America. Even this land is touched by sin, which Humbert poetically alludes to in his reference to snakes.

The second scene that evokes a longing for an innocent America occurs in the novel’s closing, when Humbert attempts to reconcile with his misdeeds. Humbert claims that he finally understands how he has wronged Lolita. Yet this revelation only continues to do violence to the young girl’s memory. Humbert passionately cries,

“Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that…and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord” (308). Humbert laments the fact that

Lolita cannot share in the innocent laughter of the children’s voices. His full description of the idyllic scene speaks of “vivid laughter” and the “clatter of a toy wagon,” all of which combines in a musical symphony at one with the sounds of the nature in this small mining town. Nothing, it seems, is more natural than a child at play, and nothing more unnatural than a child forced to abandon this play. Humbert’s image of the child at

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play is deeply sentimental, and recalls William Wordsworth’s “Ode” (1807) where young children play and frolic and exist for the pleasure of their adoring parents.9 Such an image is divorced from reality, and not only that of Lolita’s; yet it remains powerfully seductive as it invites the reader not only to imagine a simpler period of life but a simpler mode of living.

There is no doubt that this seductive image would touch the hearts of Nabokov’s post-war readers. The happy cries of the children invokes an image of peace and tranquility. This coupled with Humbert’s lament that Lolita’s voice is not among them is a reminder that America, too, was forced to “grow up.” And, like Lolita, the growing up was a painful process. Men went away to war and grew up because that had to do so, and women helped run the US economy in their absence because they also had to do so. Europe “robbed” Americans of their innocence. This is the myth, at any rate, with which Humbert leaves his readers. The trouble with this myth is that it forgets the real pain and violence of the little girl that the entire novel is supposedly about. These moments drift away into the background as the more seductive image of a hurt and wronged America comes to the forefront. Yet there is a touch of irony to the image of a vulnerable America—after all, it is the perpetrator who procures the image. Nabokov thus leaves his readers with a final choice: accept the myth given by a man who has committed innumerable crimes, or reject this myth in favor of a less glamorous picture of the nation.

Through his transformation of the virgin land myth into the virgin girl figure,

9 In the seventh stanza of Wordsworth’s “Ode,” the narrator describes the child-at-play: “Behold the Child among his new-born blisses, / A six years’ darling of a pygmy size! / See, where ‘mid work of his own hands he lies, / Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses, / With light upon him from his father’s eyes!” (lines 86-90).

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Nabokov manages to counter the image of a unified America. Women and racial minorities, whose stories are often deleted from national narratives, return in the haunting tale of Lolita’s coming-of-age. Nabokov’s Lolita is therefore best described as an anti-mythological novel, a story that purges readers of the sickness associated with

Cold War conformism and victory culture. This purgation is captured in the closing scene when Humbert becomes ill from “an attack of abominable nausea” (307). Like

Humbert, 1950s Americans also burned with a feverish desire—in this case to combat

Communism and redeem the world in America’s image. A reading of Lolita could not guarantee a cure of this illness, but it a made heroic effort to draw readers’ attention to the negative effects of mythmaking. Nabokov’s final message, then, might best be summed up as follows: Americans must indeed “grow up” and mature, but they must first consider the price of innocence and the rural playgrounds—that “heart-rendingly beautiful” American landscape—of the heroes of the American West.

Immaculate Deaths in American Suburbia

Jeffrey Eugenides’s debut novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), revisits the

American suburbs touched on in Lolita. While Humbert quickly flees suburbia after

Charlotte dies, the characters in Eugenides’s novel scrutinize their Detroit suburb.

Reviewers of the novel declare that it is a “modern classic,” and some even suggest that

Nabokov, the master of style, deeply influenced Eugenides. Indeed, as one reviewer notes, there are uncanny similarities between The Virgin Suicides and Lolita (Franco).10

For instance, the novel has an investigative style that closely resembles Humbert’s

10 In an interview with 3am Magazine, Eugenides states that his “biggest literary influences are the great Russians: Nabokov, Tolstoy, and the great Jewish Americans: Bellow and Roth.” He again confirms the influence of Nabokov in his writing in interviews with The Paris Review and Bomb Magazine.

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confession. Furthermore, the male narrators attempt to construct a history of the five

Lisbon girls, the virgins of the novel’s title, yet only manage to create an elaborate myth.

Like Humbert, the boys are too caught up in their own desire to hear the cries of the girls. Told in the first person plural, The Virgin Suicides questions the myth of the

American Dream by using the same mythmaking tactics within the novel. Eugenides follows in Nabokov’s footsteps in that he too critiques U.S. national myths. Just like

Nabokov, Eugenides invites his reader to make an ethical choice that involves questioning the policies and practices of the U.S. government. Eugenides builds upon

Nabokov’s original critique by addressing domestic problems that gained international attention during the Cold War: namely, U.S. racial politics and the policies intended to

“contain” ethnic minorities.

As in Lolita, Eugenides’s novel engages with the virgin land myth, transforming it into a tale about young virgin girls. Yet Eugenides departs from many of Nabokov’s original techniques for alluding to the U.S.’s imperial power. First, he does not “darken” his female characters. In fact, they each have distinct European features—blond hair, blue eyes, light skin. Even their surname, Lisbon, denotes a European origin. Second,

Eugenides’s selection of Detroit for his setting, a city notorious for its racial conflict (e.g.,

1943 and 1967 race riots), provides the novel with a racial undertone. Seeing as how the 1990s were a time of heightened anxiety in regard to ethnic adolescent gangs,11 and youth violence more generally, the selection of the Detroit suburb allows Eugenides to address many of the underlying issues that are erased through national myths like the

11 I am thinking, for example, about the numerous reports about L.A. gangs, and even policies implemented to deport deviant boys of Latino origins. See, for example, GusTavo Adolfo Guerra Vásquez’s “Homies Unidos: International Barrio Warriors Waging Peace on Two Fronts” in the edited collection, Youthscapes (2005), for more on youth gangs and their depiction in the U.S. media.

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virgin land. Third, and most importantly, Eugenides’s graphic descriptions of the girls’ deaths indicate a deep desire for containment. While “containment culture” is generally associated with the Cold War, Eugenides demonstrates that similar fears about the stability of U.S. culture appeared after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unresolved issues about race that emerged during the U.S.’s war against Communism, for example, return once again, sparking conversations about national narratives that supported U.S. imperial practices. This last point, I argue, is what brings Eugenides’s critique of the

U.S. into direct conversation with the issues underlying the virgin land myth.

Eugenides alludes to the desire to contain violence most explicitly in two contrasting scenes. The first scene occurs when a dinner guest, Peter Sissen, enters the girls’ bathroom.12 As he explores the bathroom, Sissen observes its mundane objects as if he were a devoted worshipper. One of the most prized objects in the bathroom shrine is a freshly used tampon, which Sissen declares “wasn’t gross but beautiful” (10). The narrators’ detailed description of the object is charged with desire, as Sissen emphasizes that the tampon was “like a modern painting or something” (10).

In this passage, the tampon, a taboo object, transforms into a work of art, a transformation that is in part due to the fact that it has literally been inside one of the girls. However, it is also an object of containment. Intended to hide blood, the tampon can be beautiful only because, as the narrators relate, it is merely “spotted” with blood rather than soaked with it. The tampon expresses a desire to contain the blood, and thus the violence, that the girls expose through their suicides, an act that becomes a

12 Sissen becomes an early example of the emasculating effect of the feminine space of the Lisbon home. A boy whose name is similar to the derogative word ‘sissy,’ Sissen’s entry is less threatening than Baldino’s because he does not pose a threat to the girls. The fact that the father, the only male in the household, invites Sissen is also symbolic since Mr. Lisbon is regularly characterized as a weak male figure.

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metaphorical stain on the suburban community.

In contrast to this relatively clean and hygienic scene, Eugenides shows two dramatic suicides involving the youngest Lisbon daughter, Cecilia. The first occurs when

Cecilia cuts her wrists with a razor blade in the upstairs bathroom. Discovered in the bathtub surrounded by a pool of bloody water, Cecilia’s suicide is by far the most graphic death in the novel. While her sisters choose less gruesome options such as gas or sleeping pills, Cecilia does not shy away from exposing her pain in a way that will shock those around her. One of the narrators, Paul Baldino, first discovers Cecilia’s body. Expecting to find a pleasing erotic image, Baldino is greeted by the spectacle of blood. Horrified, he flees the scene, and later claims that Cecilia “really sprayed the place” (15) and that her wrists were still “oozing blood” while she lay unconscious in the bathtub (13). Baldino’s description of the suicide places an emphasis on its uncontained violence. Cecilia’s body freely releases blood and mars an otherwise conventional domestic scene.

Eugenides links these intimate bathroom scenes to larger issues in the community: one narrator declares that “while the suicides lasted, and for some time after, the Chamber of Commerce worried less about the influx of black shoppers and more about the outflux of whites” (99). The narrators’ comments indicate an anxiety regarding racial homogeneity in the suburbs, and might even be related to the fears of

“race suicide.” Michelle Abate argues that fears about race suicide emerged during times of declining birth rates for white women and the increase in the immigrant population (6). Young girls who chose to buck tradition and forgo marriage and childrearing were perceived as contributors to the problem. As a result of these

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decisions, Abate argues, “the nation’s patriarchal powers worried that the New Woman would not only destroy the American social fabric but bring about the ‘race suicide’ of

Anglo-Americans” (51). Abate bears out that the decisions of young girls were heavily freighted with social significance. A girl who chose to reject the promises of domestic

“bliss” was stigmatized, much like Cecilia whose odd behavior, even before the suicide attempts, mark her as different from her more socially adjusted siblings.13

In the early 1990s, racial issues returned to the forefront of U.S. politics.

Readers, in particular, might discern parallels between the racial division in the fictional

Detroit suburb and the recent Los Angeles race riots. The riots ignited discussions about race relations in America. National news stations that covered the original

Rodney King crisis described it as a shocking event that ignited “outrage and public indignation” (Jacobs 85). When three of the four police officers involved were acquitted on April 29, 1992, the papers turned from addressing senseless police brutality to the racial biases of the white jury. In the New York Times, the jury members, all of whom hailed from the Simi Valley suburb, were described as living in a community whose very design revealed racial animosity:

The very layout of the streets in this well-to-do suburb speaks volumes about how unwelcome strangers are here, about how much safety means to the 100,000 people, most of them white, who have crossed the mountain range and then the Ventura county line to escape the chaos and discomfort of the people. (qtd. in Jacobs 116)

ABC News quoted UCLA sociologist Dr. Melvin Oliver, who claimed that “it’s where people who don’t want the problems of Los Angeles move, and, of course, they tend to

13 I am thinking, in particular, of Cecilia’s tendency to wear black underwear under a white wedding dress. Considering the racial division of the suburb, and the larger political issues of the 1990s, Cecilia’s wardrobe is no doubt symbolic. The black underwear, only revealed as the young girl rides her bicycle, is akin to the dark underside of white suburbia, and place where African Americans are discouraged from entering.

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be white” (qtd. in Jacobs 116). The repeated referral to the tendency of white, middle class people to flee the urban center of Los Angeles spoke volumes about the structure and purpose of the American suburb. Indeed, the media coverage following the Rodney

King decision made these racial divisions newly visible on a national and international scale.

The Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, Volume 2 (2007) describes the 1990s as a time when “young black males were portrayed as thugs, gangsters, and menaces to society” (530). The descriptions of the Simi Valley suburb, and later coverage of the riots, troubled this stereotype. While the L.A. race riots were largely depicted as a “black and white issue” at the time, there were multiple ethnic groups involved, including

Latinos and Korean Americans. The mainstream media chose to largely ignore the multiethnic nature of the riots and instead characterized the event as a moment of intensified racial tension between whites and blacks. Ronald Jacobs explains that reporters followed a rhetorical pattern that involved “contrast[ing] the optimism and prosperity of the 1960s with the apathy and pessimism of the 1990s” (124). The continued insistence on the failure to address racial tension between white and black

Americans led to discussions of how race shapes the way one interprets racial violence.

Jacobs reveals the conclusions of a focus group, where “African-American informants interpreted the television images of the uprisings as legitimate protest against racial and economic injustice; white and Latino informants, by contrast, interpreted the events primarily as criminal activities by anti-civil opportunists” (132).

While the events in Los Angeles reinvigorated discussions of racial division in

America, they were not the only events of the early ‘90s to spotlight racial issues. For

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example, the U.S. response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait renewed stereotypes of

Middle Easterners that paralleled the negative criticism of young blacks. For instance, propaganda surrounding the war described the Iraqis as cruel and callous, most famously in the Nayirah testimony, where a fifteen-year-old Kuwait girl described how the Iraqi soldiers removed twenty-two newborns from their incubators and left them to die on the hospital floor. This testimony has since been questioned, and many agree that it was false information that President Bush eagerly adopted in an effort to “sell” his war.14 It is clear that Nayirah’s description of the Iraqi soldiers, and Bush’s continued reference to this testimony in later speeches regarding the Gulf War, helped revive stereotypes about Middle Eastern men. As Edward Said explains in Orientalism (1978), these stereotypes are a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3).

As I noted in my reading of Lolita, the virgin land myth was first instituted in order to erase issues related to race and gender, as were other national myths that were popularized in the 1950s. However, the virgin land myth stands apart from these other myths due to its relation to land loss during the period of U.S. westward expansion.

Primary features of the virgin land myth, including an emphasis on the fertility of the land and the abundance of wide-open spaces allowed Americans to colonize Native tribes without the guilt associated with such actions. Such myths remained popular as a way of assuaging white guilt, and continued to be invoked to revive American patriotism and instill within U.S. citizens American values. In the Cold War context, the virgin land myth aided in the project of creating a single unified narrative about the United States.

14 See, for example, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) December 1992 video report on Nayirah’s testimony, entitled “To Sell a War—Gulf War Propaganda.”

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Returning to the myth of the wide-open spaces of the American West made it easier to glorify American history and remove troublesome “spots” on the U.S. record—stains akin to those Paul Baldino discovers in the girls’ bathroom.

As the narrators’ comments about racial tension in their Detroit suburb indicate, part of what is at stake in the novel is territory, or land perceived as belonging to the white suburbanites. The theme of territorial wars becomes most evident in the reaction of the neighborhood to Cecilia’s successful suicide, when appears an intense desire to contain the violence exposed by the death. This desire is made evident when the narrators attempt to recreate the girl’s final actions: “First came the sound of wind, a rushing we decided later must have been caused by her wedding dress filled with air.

This was brief. A human body falls fast” (30). Flinging herself from her bedroom window and landing on the spiked fence outside, Cecilia ensures that her body will be beyond saving. Her death, the narrators assure us, was quick and painless, but Cecilia’s suicide is not without its irony. Her body is ruptured by the phallic symbol of the fence post, which “punctured her left breast, [and] traveled through her inexplicable heart” (30-31).

The boys, however, do not catch the irony of Cecilia’s death; instead, they focus on the immaculate nature of her untimely end: “The spike had gone through so fast there was no blood on it. It was perfectly clean and Cecilia merely seemed balanced on the pole like a gymnast” (31). The boys’ description of Cecilia’s lifeless body transforms her into the image of the Virgin that she is found clutching after her first suicide attempt. No longer the monstrous, blood-ridden body encountered earlier by Baldino, Cecilia’s body can now be read as the immaculate virgin. What is important about the narrators’ description is the way that it inserts Cecilia—a girl who fails to live up to Anglo-American

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expectations for young women—into a narrative acceptable to white suburbanites.

Writing their report in retrospect, the boys censor Cecilia’s rebellious act and inscribe it into a neat, clean narrative that retroactively tames her.

Yet Cecilia’s inclusion in this narrative is always tenuous. Later, when the boys’ fathers all pitch in to remove the “dangerous” fence, the blood that the narrators previously claimed was absent reappears. Like much of the narrative, the discovery of the blood has a mythical quality:

“You can see the blood,” Anthony Turkis said, and we looked to see if the blood that hadn’t been there at the time of the suicide had arrived after the fact. Some said it was on the third spike, some said the fourth, but it was as impossible as finding the bloody shovel on the back of Abbey Road where all the clues proclaimed that Paul was dead. (54)

The suburbanites’ search for the “blood that hadn’t been there at the time of the suicide” is almost comical in the way that it resembles the exaggeration of American tall tales.

Much like a description of Paul Bunyan’s height, Cecilia’s bloody spike changes places depending on who is speaking. This obsession with the blood is telling on a number of levels. First, the fear of blood re-appearing suggests an anxiety that the repressed facts of Cecilia’s suicide will return to haunt the neighborhood. As the narrators suggest throughout their “report,” the suburb might be boring but it is thriving. It is only with the shocking death of one of the Lisbon daughters that the entire community is jolted into acknowledging their less than perfect lifestyle and its deterioration at pace with the demise of the Lisbon family. Second, the obsession with blood indicates that the suburbanites have their own “spots” that taint the neighborhood, and that it is only with

Cecilia’s death that these bloody stains rise to the surface.

Eugenides’s portrayal of Cecilia as the catalyst for the cataclysmic events that follow has clear parallels with the Cold War situation. Indeed, the fact that Cecilia is the

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one able to tip the other girls over into depression and ultimately death is reminiscent of the “domino theory” that prevailed during this time. This rapid spread of youth depression is described later by the adults as a “disease” that is capable of being transmitted from one girl to the next. Even though the narrators dismiss this explanation of the girls’ deaths, it is a relationship that they explore further in the aftermath of the girls’ suicides. As the narrators recall this popular interpretation of the mass suicides, they remark,

More and more, people forgot about the individual reasons why the girls may have killed themselves, the stress disorders and insufficient neurotransmitters, and instead put the deaths down to the girls’ foresight in predicting decadence. People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped-out elms, the harsh sunlight, the continuing decline of our auto industry. (244)

As the narrators indicate here, the community begins to see the girls as a symbol not only of their declining Detroit suburb but of the nation at large. The community members attribute the sadness that the boys can’t quite understand to “something sick at the heart of the country [that] had infected the girls,” a symptom of living in what the older community members recognize as a “dying empire” (231).

Eugenides intensifies the connection between the girls, death, and U.S. empire through multiple descriptions of a massive city project to control the Dutch Elm disease that is killing suburban trees. One of the most crucial scenes in the novel occurs when the girls form a chain around the old oak in their front yard. Using their bodies, the girls refuse to acquiesce to the state mandate to cut down all infected trees. The girls recognize the absurdity of cutting down trees in order to save them, arguing that in so doing, the city destroys them anyway. The girls’ prediction proves to be correct, and the suburb becomes a barren lifeless place as the city workers remove all sickly trees. Lisa

Kirby remarks, “When one investigates the text, it becomes clear that Eugenides’s novel

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is a document chronicling the isolation and illusion that exists in the postmodern

American suburban community” (51). The illusion that Kirby identifies is the suburb’s imagined immunity to the problems that plague urban Detroit. Recalling the narrators’ earlier claim about the suburbanites’ fears of an increasing black population, the new scenario of the girls fighting to save diseased trees suggests the city is partly responsible for its own decline.

Eugenides’s insertion of this ethical dilemma highlights a very poignant distinction that Sunaina Maira makes in her study of Muslim American youth in post-

9/11 America. Maira argues that the word “empire” is often glamorized at the expense of those who suffer under its power. Speaking specifically about the term’s use in the

United States, Maira explains the important difference between “empire” and

“imperialism,” and why contemporary usage of the former is problematic. She writes:

The discourse of empire has shifted and the meanings of empire are rewritten and revised by political conservatives as well as liberals, not just reintroducing and normalizing the term, but rehabilitating the concept of empire as a just, necessary, and benevolent force. “Imperialism,” however, has been resistant to this makeover and has retained the taint of an undesirable form of power. (45)

Maira’s explanation provides further insight into the suburbanite’s interpretation of the girls’ deaths as “an act of foresight.” The community literally sees this death as foreshadowing the decline of their community, a connection that, as Maira indicates, is often made in relation to youth, who are seen as tokens of the nation’s future (14). In light of Maira’s reading, Eugenides’s earlier use of the word “empire” gains further significance, as it attests to the desire to “makeover” the cruel acts of the white members of the community, who go to great lengths to regulate the influx of urban blacks. In seeing the suburb as a part of and a figure for a larger U.S. empire, the

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suburbanites justify the power that they wield.

Eugenides is able to critique the American Dream by presenting readers with one of its most iconic images: the suburb. His deployment of the tropes of the virgin land myth strengthen this critique. Like Nabokov, Eugenides introduces a male narrator who is fascinated with the lovely Lisbon daughters, and who, like Humbert, produces an elaborate myth regarding the girls’ daily lives. Through the memories of the narrators, now fully grown men, Eugenides captures the potential consequences of myth-making.

For example, in the climax of the novel, the boys sneak out and go over to the girls’ home in the middle of the night, anticipating a wild escape to warm and sunny Florida.

The boys, eager for an adventure and emanating with manly pride, are shocked when they discover that the girls’ previous request for help was only a ruse. When the boys discover the first body, a dangling, lifeless corpse that was once Bonnie Lisbon, they observe, “We had never known her. They had brought us here to find that out” (213). As one by one the boys survey the destruction of the remaining Lisbon girls, they regret their selfish desires and ignorance of the extent of the girls’ pain. “We knew them now,” they conclude after escaping from the coffin of a house (217). Although the hard lesson of death might seem to cure the boys of their selfishness, it does not stop them from trying to capture the girls even after they are gone in the mysterious tale of the their life and death. As men, they admit that even now they long for the girls and imagine them when they are with other female lovers (147).

Much like the adult members of the community, and like Humbert before them, the boys fail to see the part they play in the girls’ pain. Intent on fabricating an elaborate story where they play the role of the knight in shining armor, the narrators distort the

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facts that they collect in order to create a cohesive narrative that will explain the deaths.

The girls, for their part, are acutely aware of the roles given to them by the narrators.

Although the girls remove any opportunity for a clandestine union, they do fulfill this role in the end. Each girl chooses a death that is as immaculate as Cecilia’s successful suicide. Bonnie kills herself with a rope that she ties to the basement rafter; Mary successfully kills herself with sleeping pills; Lux slowly drifts away into oblivion while breathing the noxious gasses from her mother’s car; and Therese too causes her demise with sleeping pills. The girls’ decisions to fulfill the roles given them by the male narrators reveal their acute understanding of their position as eroticized virgins. Their violent act preserves the myth the boys create, yet does so in a way that is disturbingly grotesque. Bonnie’s dangling corpse, with the blood pooling in her face and limbs, shatters any erotic image the boys harbor about her and her sisters. It is through the inclusion of violent acts such as these that Eugenides ultimately unravels the myths used to justify actions such as racial segregation.

Even prior to the mass suicides, Eugenides inserts moments of resistance where the girls voice their opposition to their roles as immaculate virgins. For example,

Therese remarks, “We just want to live. If anyone would let us” (132). Later, during their confinement following the Homecoming dance fiasco, the girls send messages to their male admirers using the same picture of the Virgin Mary that the medical team found on

Cecilia after her first suicide attempt. In selecting the image of the virgin as a representation of their group identity, the girls at once accept the boys’ vision of them and align themselves with Cecilia’s more radical subjectivity. On these cards, the girls express their innermost feelings. A card from Lux expresses her anger and resentment

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towards her former boyfriend, Trip Fontaine: “Tell Trip I’m over him. He’s a creep” (192).

Other messages range from frustration to anger, from “Remember us?” to “Down with unsavory boys” (192). Finally, the messages end with hopeful words and a desperate plea: “In this dark, there will be light. Will you help us?” (192-193). Having expressed their grievances, the girls revert to a more subdued tone in order to lure the boys to their home. This shift in tone expresses the conflict between male and female perception of the world. The girls understand their position in their community much more than the boys who control the narration, and they ultimately accept that they can only communicate their message through a counter-mythmaking.

The spectacular nature of their final demise guarantees the girls a place in the community’s memory, even if that memory is always aligned with myth. In her essay on

The Virgin Suicides, Debra Shostak elaborates on the relationship between myth and history, an important distinction to make both for an understanding of the novel and the larger implications for the image of the American West. Shostak argues that the novel contains “conflicting representational modes,” and these conflicts reveal the boys’ discomfort with anything that challenges their vision of the world. Shostak’s remarks about the boys’ final statements about the girls, a eulogy on par with Humbert’s regret that Lolita is not a part of the cacophony of children’s voices, explains why history is not a suitable medium for the boys’ tale: “to know, to allow the girls to fall from myth into history, would be to allow them to move from the status of objects to that of subjects”

(826). Shostak aligns the Lisbon girls with the colonized subject so that the boys’ narrative is interpreted as a violence worse than the girls’ self-inflicted injuries.

However, Shostak concludes that the hubris of the boys need not be shared by the

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readers: readers must make an ethical choice that involves siding with the narrators or rejecting their worldview.

The ethical dilemma of the reader is a familiar one. Moments such as the end of the Cold War and September 11 shake the very foundations of the nation, putting into question foundation myths such as the “virgin land.” In moments of uncertainty, myth works to simplify the world by presenting a unity and harmony that is untrue to the real experience of Americans. In the aftermath of September 11, for example, there was a revival of the Western myths, including the “Homeland” and “Virgin Land.” These myths, according to Donald Pease, were crucial to the recuperation project of America’s prior vision of itself (156). However, myths are also potentially empowering. This is what

Smith attempted to relate to his readers in his prefatory note to Virgin Land, where he announces that myth helps define experience by providing it with a “coherence” that might otherwise be lacking (ix). Smith admits that “myths can become dangerous” when they simplify complex experiences; yet he continues to have faith in myth’s unifying powers (ix-x). Myth becomes as much a way of working through fear and anxiety as it is a tool for erasing them.

Francisco Collado-Rodríguez charts the similarities between Eugenides’ project and that of the Latin American author Gabriel García Márquez. While Collado-

Rodríguez shares Shostak’s sentiment that The Virgin Suicides ultimately empowers the reader through its mythical structure, he proposes an alternative view of myth by returning to the origins of magical realism: “Magical realism sprouts from the critical analysis of one or different aboriginal cultures that were subject to colonization—mostly by European countries, while they were frequently neo-colonized by the United States”

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(38). Collado-Rodríguez suggests that Eugenides uses the Lisbon girls to encourage

“an ethical coming back to the values of collective identity and the restoration of the bonds between human being and nature, self and world” (38). Collado-Rodríguez situates the Lisbon girls as the colonial subject, and thereby identifies an “American- style” magical realism, one that accounts for the strange case of the United States’

“imperialist behavior against its own minorities” (38). Collado-Rodríguez also underscores the way in which myth can function as a productive tool for working through complex emotions. In the case of Eugenides, one can see the way in which he draws upon the past in order to construct a critique of U.S. national narratives.

Set in the 1970s, The Virgin Suicides testifies to the anxiety rooted in the instability of this period. In their final commemorative act, the suburbanites memorialize the sadness they identify as part and parcel of the nation at large. Made of “virgin timber,” the simple wooden bench that they place in the town center claims that the girls were “daughters of the community” (232). The girls’ connection to nature, especially the dying elm trees, expresses disillusionment with American myths, particularly the foundation myth of the “virgin land.” The dying land, like the dying girls, signals the decline of the town, a fate that the community comes to accept as inevitable.

Eugenides’s interrogation of the American Dream similarly presents the decline of suburbia as inevitable. Eugenides’s reliance on the virgin land myth in order to challenge the American Dream also places him within the tradition of novelists like

Vladimir Nabokov, for whom myth becomes a tool for dismantling American myths rather than reinforcing them. Moreover, the 1990s, as the novel indicates, was plagued by its own nightmares. The foreboding within the narrative and Eugenides’s

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identification of the 1970s as the beginning of a long and disastrous tumble for the

American nation sets the stage for darker narratives. A crucial transitional figure,

Eugenides’s paves the way for a more active virgin girl who is finally able to speak for herself and escape the tragic end that befalls the Lisbon girls.

A Plague Shall Descend Upon Him: Power, Redemption, and Revenge

In Louise Erdrich’s poem, “The Strange People” (1984),15 a female antelope is captured by a male hunter and, in a fantastic turn of events, manages to escape being butchered. As the antelope awaits her fate, she declares, “I wipe the death scum / from my mouth, sit up laughing / and shriek in my speeding grave” (lines 13-15). Shortly thereafter, she manages to confront her attacker and then leaves, wondering who might have the capacity to wound her, not merely in flesh but in spirit. Erdrich’s narration in

“The Strange People” demonstrates the transformation that overtakes the female speaker when she struggles to escape from her male captor. It is but one in many instances where Erdrich considers the power of women and their capacity to survive, even when the odds are against them. Erdrich has written numerous works where women manage to overcome tragedy. Yet it is her more recent novel, The Plague of

Doves (2008), that places her within the tradition of writers attempting to unravel the virgin land myth. Although Erdrich has long considered the impact of the government’s expansion policies and modern legal relationship with recognized tribes, she pays especial attention in Plague to the way that women and the land are tied together.

Moreover, as in the earlier works we have examined featuring the figure of the virgin girl, Erdrich features young girls who challenge the authority of their male companions

15 Erdrich’s poem first appeared in her collection of poems, entitled Jacklight (1984).

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in order to assert their power. However, it is their ultimate success in doing so that separates Erdrich’s novel from its predecessors.

Plague returns to the familiar landscape of North Dakota, the setting of many of

Erdrich’s novels, including Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and The

Master Butchers Singing Club (2003). The flat lands of Pluto, North Dakota serve as the site of a terrible tragedy, where a family is murdered by a mentally unstable neighbor.

The only survivor is a baby girl. This tragedy results in the hanging of four innocent

Native American men who discover the child and are then charged with murdering the family. The history of death and tragedy haunt many of the characters in Pluto, including the young girl in the story, but it is the depiction of two girls in particular that places

Erdrich’s novel into dialogue with previous critiques of the virgin land myth. Evelina Harp and Marn Wolde are each caught up in the cycle of violence that originates in the Pluto murders. Evelina, the granddaughter of one of the men wrongfully accused (but, who survives the hanging) is also related to a family called the Wildstrands, who participated in the lynch mob. Marn is the daughter of a German immigrant family who struggles to survive as farmers. Marn eventually marries Billy Peace, a melancholy descendent of one of the men who is executed for the murders. While both young women are connected to the trauma of the murders, it is their subjection to this history, particularly through male figures, that constructs them as virgin girl figures. However, Erdrich finds ways to subvert the conventions of the virgin girl figure at multiple points in her narrative. Both Evelina and Marn narrate their own stories, and Evelina goes to great lengths to challenge traditional interpretations of the murders, tracing the history of this

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bloody tale and in turn becoming a storyteller of both the town’s and her own personal history.

The Many Roles of the Modern Virgin Girl

In Erdrich’s Plague, Evelina and Marn are identified early on as desired and desiring beings. Evelina begins her first narrative section with a tale of young love, a childhood romance where she pursues her classmate and cousin, Corwin Peace. The obsessive and intense nature of this love is conveyed by Evelina when she declares,

My fingers obsessively wrote the name of my beloved up and down my arm or in my hand or on my knee. If I wrote his name a million times on my body, I believed he would kiss me. I knew he loved me, and he was safe in the knowledge that I loved him. (9)

Evelina’s desire for Corwin is evident in her constant act of writing, a writing at once intimate, as it is literally on her body, and sexual, as she writes in places that “changed and warmed in response to the repetition of those letters” (10). While Evelina’s love for

Corwin is intense, she insists that this love be reciprocated. Evelina is not simply a prepubescent girl with a crush on one of her classmates; her love, she insists, follows a pattern of the great romances that are part of her family’s tradition. She provides descriptions of Corwin “desperately trying to catch [her] eye” (14) and turning to her with

“a burning glare of anguished passion” (15), feelings that are eventually consummated when the two kiss.

Similarly, Marn is defined by a love affair, in this case with Corwin’s Uncle Billy.

Marn explains that at the age of sixteen, she “was looking at them [men] just to figure, for pure survival, the way a girl does” (138). Yet when Marn meets Billy shortly thereafter, she decides to act on her desires. Marn chases Billy much like Evelina chases Corwin; however Marn differs from Evelina in that she has a host of admirers.

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After the end of her relationship with Billy, Marn walks into the local restaurant called the

4-B’s. Marn is immediately welcomed by the male workers, who we learn are not her only admirers: “You have a crush on her too?” Evelina declares as she observes her coworker staring at Marn. And earlier, she concedes, “She was almost beautiful when she smiled and looked into a person’s eyes. I could see why Billy, I guess, and Earl, had crushes on her. She had a facile, tough, energetic little body” (187).

Erdrich defines the two youngest female characters in Plague in terms of passionate and intense love affairs that consume those involved. Like the girls in Lolita and The Virgin Suicides, this love can become destructive. Evelina, for example, is tortured by Corwin’s ploys to win her heart, which take the form of cruel childish pranks, whereas Marn is enveloped in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship with her husband, whose desire to reclaim Indian land and rights obsess him. The status of victim is a familiar one for the virgin girl, who is often beaten, humiliated, tortured, or stifled by the rules of modern society until she has few options for escape. It is not coincidence that my previous examples both end in death. The death of these tormented female figures is a way for authors to demonstrate the intensity of the trauma experienced by the girls. It is often in the aftermath of these deaths that those responsible for their pain begin to consider the depths of the girls’ emotional lives.

Likewise, readers are encouraged to consider the social patterns that precipitated these deaths and are at least in part responsible for them.

Erdrich underscores the plight of her young female characters through vivid descriptions of physical and emotional abuse. During her childhood romance, Evelina begins to distance herself from Corwin after he humiliates her by sharing the secret of

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their kiss. This betrayal of her trust leaves Evelina feeling “wretchedly angry” (43). As

Corwin continues to try and win her affections, Evelina describes the inner turmoil she feels: “I looked on, helpless” (48); “I was near puking with anxious rage” (49); and “I felt an unrecoverable tenderness boil up and rise around my ears” (53). As Evelina matures, she finds herself again victimized by Corwin. During a particularly raucous party, Corwin slips Evelina a powerful hallucinogen that causes her to lock herself in her room and eventually check herself into a mental institution.

Erdrich similarly describes Marn’s life as one of pain. As she suffers various forms of mental and physical abuse, Marn describes her mixed emotions about her domestic situation: “I considered myself weak-willed, a follower, never speaking up if I could help it” (160); “I decided I hated him so much that I would not let him breathe until

I’d soldered myself inside of him. Until I ruled him so that he could hurt no one” (178); and “I feel old, so captured by life already” (151). Marn’s situation is considerably more dire than Evelina’s, and she is subjected to forms of physical abuse that are disturbing, including sleep deprivation, bodily mutilation, and slaps on the face. Erdrich’s inclusion of these scenes of violence are telling: as in the narratives examined above, these scenes are powerful indicators of the cultural turmoil of the reader’s present, and they likewise emphasize the manipulation of young girls at the hands of men.

The gendered nature of the abuse in Plague has led to a number of interpretations of Erdrich’s novel within a feminist framework. For example, in an essay on nationalism and gender, Gina Valentino argues that “Erdrich’s novel offers a feminist critique of a Native nationalist cultural politics that echoes Huhndorf’s critique of a tendency among male critics such as Warrior, Weaver, and Womack to marginalize

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women” (126). Valentino addresses the tendency for male critics, including those of

Native American descent, to marginalize women by stereotyping them as “race traitors”

(126). Women are persecuted due to their perceived tendency to either upset male power or to betray their culture altogether, especially through activities such as writing.

Erdrich’s more recent novel, however, is more than just a critique of male patriarchy: it is also part of a much longer critical conversation concerning destructive national myths. While her presentation of abused girls places Erdrich’s novel firmly within the tradition of virgin land criticism, the inclusion of historical and Biblical references strengthens this association. Erdrich includes past historical events such as the lynching of four Native American men and the rebellion of Louis Riel as a way of expressing the suffering and persecution of Native American tribes. She likewise includes discussions of ways that the U.S. government has tried to control Native people, including blood quantum, boarding schools, and land removal.

Of these, land removal figures most prominently, and this practice is most closely associated with the myth that most interests Erdrich. Throughout the narrative, her virgin girl characters decry the loss of land, albeit from radically different perspectives.

At one point, Evelina overhears a conversation between her aunt, Neve Harp, and her grandfather Mooshum, where the latter angrily cries, “What you are asking is how [the land] was stolen?” (84). Evelina explains that the loss of land would “enter me, too” and remain as a “sorrow” for the rest of her life (84). Evelina’s sense of loss is intergenerational, a pain that is passed down because no healing takes place. Marn’s loss does not have this same sense of large-scale tragedy. While Marn loves the land, particularly the 888 acres that make up her family’s farm, this land is marred by the

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history of colonization: it was stolen, to use Mooshum’s words, from the Native people in the Pluto area. Still, Marn fights to regain control of her land from her husband, Billy: after killing him, she cries that she had “the land deed in my name” (179). The girls are both defined by their love and loss of land, a fact that connects them to a key aspect of the virgin land myth.

Since the main purpose of the virgin land myth was to bolster national pride and to encourage Americans to settle in the western frontier, it was necessary to create an image of this desolate land that would be attractive to prospective settlers. “Virgin” indicated that the land beyond the frontier was unspoiled and more fertile than that of the east. Moreover, as policies such as the Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged westward expansion, many left their homes in the East in search of property. Many settlers, fulfilling Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of a yeoman society, were in fact farmers who believed the propaganda about the unsettled land being the “garden of the world.”

Erdrich draws upon this imagery in order to challenge the myth of the “virgin” land, making clear that this land was already long occupied before the arrival of white settlers.

While reference to historical events in the struggle between Native people and white settlers is part of Erdrich’s critique, she also includes references to the images that featured most prominently in the national myth of the virgin land. The “garden,” in particular, becomes a potent image because it not only refers to the tendency to depict the land as the “garden of the world” but also has roots in Judeo-Christian mythology.

Because missionaries were often responsible for the cultural assimilation of Native children, and since the North Dakota area was influenced by French Catholics, Erdrich connects each of her virgin girl figures to this aspect of the virgin land myth.

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Evelina’s very name connects her to the Judeo-Christian Eve—her family even often shortens her name to “Eve.” Like the Eve of myth, Evelina tempts the men around her and encourages them to misbehave. In addition to instigating a series of classroom pranks that are carried out by her male admirer, Evelina encourages her grandfather’s riotous behavior, even slipping him alcohol when he is not supposed to have it.

Moreover, as with the biblical Eve’s pursuit of the tree of knowledge, Evelina seeks the knowledge denied her by her elders. She ruthlessly attempts to unravel the mystery of the Pluto murders, going so far as to draw up a genealogical chart for the town. Evelina explains that as she develops her complicated chart, which resembles “elaborate spider webs,” she encounters resistance from her elders: “I could not erase the questions underneath, and Mooshum was no help. He bore interrogation with a vexed wince and silence. I persisted…” (86). Evelina’s determination to unravel the myth surrounding the

Pluto murders, and ultimately her own family history, marks her as a powerful and potentially threatening figure. Like the biblical Eve, Evelina’s search for answers could potentially destroy the town of Pluto, as it would challenge the narrative that the town has accepted and used in order to survive past traumas. Moreover, her search threatens to undercut the family hierarchy, as the stories she has been told about the murders make her grandfather into a victim and a hero. While Evelina’s Mooshum is indeed victimized by his history, he also had a hand to play in the murders since he betrayed his friends while in a drunken stupor by revealing their connection to the family.

Like Evelina, Marn also adopts traits of the biblical Eve. While Marn does not initially have the power to challenge male authority, she engages in alarming rituals with

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her pet snakes that allow her to regain her sense of power and autonomy. In one such passage, Marn milks her two snakes, and then hides the poison behind an apple. The iconography of the snake and the apple link her immediately to the story of Adam and

Eve. There are other scenes in the novel that further cement the connection between

Marn and the biblical Eve. Marn allows her snakes to curl around her body while naked, and in one particularly sexualized scene, she invites Billy to join her in bed with the snakes. Similarly, when Marn is bit by one of her snakes, she exclaims, “Let the sickness boil up, and the questions, and the fruit of the tree of power” (162). The snakes, she asserts, are “my way of getting close to spirit” (160). Marn’s sacrilegious behavior, particularly in the way she equates her snakes with the Holy Spirit, transform her from a victimized girl into a powerful temptress. Although Erdrich makes it clear that

Marn is in an abusive relationship during her entire time with Billy, she also creates scenes where Marn’s lust for power and vengeance is horrifying, as when she states that “the hatred was an animal so big I wanted to let it take Billy in his jaw” (177-178).

Erdrich often blurs the boundary between victim and perpetrator, reflecting her investment in issues that arose following the events of September 11, 2001. In an interview with Jeff Baenen (also available in excerpts in the P.S. section of the novel),16

Erdrich reveals that 9/11 was an inspiration for the novel: “I think vengeance, rather than sitting back and allowing justice to be done over time, is really so much a part of our history. And unfortunately, it’s part of our present, as well….” Erdrich further notes that 9/11 was one of those moments where “a terrible thirst for someone to be caught and punished right away” emerged. By framing Evelina and Marn as both victim and

16 See “A Dark Event Inspires Erdrich’s New Novel” in the June 9, 2008 edition of The Associated Press.

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perpetrator, Erdrich brings past and present together. On the one hand, she frames her book with the murder of the Pluto family, an idea she developed after coming across a newspaper clipping about a similar incident; on the other hand, she relates this historical incident to the present of her fictional characters, thereby encouraging her readers to also draw parallels between the past and the present. Erdrich’s construction of Evelina and Marn as virgin girl figures aids in this endeavor, as she plays upon the virgin girl’s traditional status as victim and then puts this status into question. If we return to

Evelina’s childhood romance, for example, the same quotations I cited previously take on a new meaning. Evelina claims that she “looked on, helpless” (48) as Corwin carries out one of his pranks, and these same pranks left her feeling like “puking with anxious rage” (49). Evelina’s horror and rage “boil[s] up and rise[s]” (53) in a later scene as she observes the embarrassment of her beloved teacher, who is shamed by a class joke that Evelina initiates. These very same comments read in the context of 9/11 parallel the growing rage, fear, and anxiety that emerged after 9/11. As many critics have commented, those of Middle Eastern descent or whose skin color might cause others to incorrectly identify them as Middle Eastern were often under attack, even suffering bodily harm.17 This toxic environment, Erdrich suggests throughout her narrative, is caused when adults let their emotions rule them.

Erdrich continues to develop her theme of “unfettered vengeance” through a variety of scenarios where the line between victim and perpetrator are blurred. In so doing, she further destabilizes earlier depictions of the virgin girl as victim. If we read

17 See, for example, Sunaina Maira’s Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11 (2009). In addition, the horrific misidentification of Kimberly Lowe, a Creek Indian, as a Muslim American demonstrated the extent to which anyone with darker skin color was subject to racism and hate crimes in the aftermath of 9/11. See Natsu Saito’s “The Cost of Homeland Security” in Radical History Review for more on Lowe’s murder.

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Evelina as a classic virgin girl, for example, she is understood as only a victim of

Corwin’s malicious pranks and has every right to feel anger and shame. Yet Evelina’s hatred for Corwin and her deep pleasure in tormenting him does not allow readers to read her as simply a helpless victim. Indeed, Evelina’s repeated comments regarding her past love interest are downright cruel: “no matter how hard I tried to humiliate him,

Corwin stayed in love with me” (43). This cruelty coupled with her misguided rage directly relates to Erdrich’s concern regarding unfettered vengeance. Through the character of Evelina, Erdrich demonstrates the wider implications of impassioned rage.

When Evelina colors after one of Corwin’s jokes, it is because her teacher, Sister Mary

Anita, is the butt of the children’s teasing. Evelina knows that she has had a hand to play in these classroom pranks, as she was the first to compare her teacher with the

Japanese monster Godzilla. Evelina’s thoughtless ridicule spreads when Corwin invites other children to participate in the taunting of Sister Mary Anita. While Evelina feels shamed for her past actions, especially after learning how deeply they hurt Sister Mary

Anita, she continues to act impulsively and cruelly, even if she does not perceive her actions as such. In her attempts to protect her teacher, Evelina punches, kicks, and spits insults at Corwin, a tactic that is disturbingly similar to the actions that initiated the class joke in the first place.

Marn similarly breaks down the binary between victim and perpetrator. While

Marn does suffer enormously at the hands of her husband, she also plots vengeance in a way that does not leave her free of guilt. On multiple occasions, Marn’s uncle hisses

“you’re gonna kill” (158, 177), a claim that proves prophetic when Marn begins to plot to murder her husband. Marn’s pleasure in the act of murdering also put her intentions into

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question. For example, as she prepares to stab Billy with the poisoned needle, she remarks, “I would not let him go until I sank through his bones like a wasting disease.

Ate him from the inside, devouring his futility” (178). Much like Billy, Marn appears to enjoy power once it is hers, and she wields it in ways that brushes against the norms for women.

Lest one think Erdrich is casting Marn as a modern “fallen woman,” Erdrich continually troubles the all-too-easy association between Marn’s vengeful acts and evil.

Certainly, Marn’s abusive husband encourages readers to side with Marn, even as she engages in illegal behavior. This desire to side with Marn is further solidified by Billy’s construction as a windigo (153-154; 156-157), or an icy monster from the mythology of

Northern Native tribes. Erdrich includes many scenarios where Billy’s desires are out of control and cause those around him to suffer. Likewise, his characterization as a windigo suggest that he is no longer human, and that killing him is in fact the only humane thing to do. By drawing upon Native American mythology, Erdrich indicates that

Marn’s actions are justified and even necessary.

Most critics of Erdrich comment on her tendency to blur boundaries in relation to gender and sexuality. However, I would argue that it is the girls’ uncertain status as victim and perpetrator that is more relevant here. As unconventional virgin girl figures,

Evelina and Marn challenge stereotypes about girls as innocent, pure, and helpless.

Historically goodness has been associated with white, middle-class girlhood, and girls who failed to live up to standards, as is evidenced in literary examples such as Louisa

May Alcott’s Jo March, are frequently punished. Girls like Jo are ridiculed for “acting like boys.” In her study of tomboyism in American culture, Michelle Ann Abate explains that

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for white girls acting like a boy was acceptable only so long as the girl outgrew this stage in a reasonable amount of time. If she continued to demonstrate masculine behavior, she was chastised and marked as a social deviant. This form of discipline, known as “tomboy taming,” gained in popularity during the Civil War period. Abate suggests that this was due to the emergence at that time of a new phase of childhood: adolescence (28). Girls could be tomboys so long as they cast off their boyish behavior by the time they reached adolescence; those who failed to do so would be punished.

Abate further explains that the wildness of little girls was often associated with Native

Americans: girls were described as “wild Indians” when they exhibited boyish behaviors

(142).

While Abate reads the white girl as raced due to her activity, this reading does not hold for Evelina, who, despite her white blood, would still be considered a Native

American girl. Evelina is unique because she comes from a family of privilege—her father is a science teacher at the reservation school and the family lives in Bureau of

Indian Affairs housing, along with many modern comforts that go along with town life

(36). This allows her to enjoy middle class status in a town where most girls of her background are significantly less well off. Erdrich’s blurring of boundaries thereby shows how race, class, and gender are likewise tied up in these acts of vengeance.

Rather than focus solely on how Evelina’s background might limit her ability to challenge dominant narratives about gender and race, Erdrich in fact empowers her by upsetting Anglo-American expectations regarding girlhood. From the beginning, Evelina engages in activities that are coded as masculine: she is outspoken, rambunctious, and bold. Much like the girls in Erdrich’s work for children, Evelina’s behavior draws upon

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traditional Ojiwba notions of gender, which similarly blur the boundaries between male and female norms. In his reading of the arc of Erdrich’s Birchbark series, Don Latham insists that girls’ engagement in traditional male activities do not necessarily mark them as socially deviant. Girls who act like boys are not pressured to change their behavior because Ojiwba culture accepts the possibility for gender variance, or the ability to choose one’s gender, despite one’s biological sex. Members of the tribe may even change gender over time, as Jacobs, Thomas, and Lang attest in their study of Native

American cultures (4). It is only when the behavior of gender variants threaten the overall welfare of the tribe that they are punished. In the Birchbark series, a young tomboy named “Two Strike” exemplifies this description. Latham explains that Two

Strike’s boyish behavior is problematic because “her ‘gift’ is not channeled in consistently productive ways to serve the greater good of the community” (139).

Despite her Ojibwa roots, Evelina is still subject to the social expectations of white culture, a fact that is made evident in the imagery in her stories. Evelina channels her boyish behavior in order to discover answers regarding the Pluto murders. This determination to find answers requires her to rely on more masculine behavior—she does not take “no” for an answer when interviewing town members, even her male elders. Both historian and storyteller, Evelina has the ability to reinterpret history, a power that was never granted to earlier virgin girls. In the fictional town of Pluto, much like in Anglo-American traditions, men tend to be the storytellers and interpreters of historical events. In fact, it is Evelina’s Mooshum who is first introduced as storyteller, and these stories play a central role in the childhood portion of Evelina’s testimony.18

18 I use the word “testimony” here on purpose, since Evelina is very much witnessing the aftereffects of a town tragedy.

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One of the very first images that Evelina shares is part of a story that Mooshum tells about his first meeting with his late wife. In the story, a plague of doves descends upon the town and destroys the town’s crops. This plague of doves also leads him to his future love: when the town women try to chase the doves away, he is hit in the head by an escaping dove. Upon awakening, he sees his future wife, a young girl dressed in a beautiful white dress:

I saw two beings—the boy shaken, frowning; the girl in white kneeling over him with the sash of her dress gracefully clutched in her hand, then pressing the cloth to the wound on his head, staunching the flow of blood. Most important, I imagined their dark, mutual gaze. The Holy Spirit hovered between them. Her sash reddened. His blood defied gravity and flowed up her arm. Then her mouth opened. (12)

Evelina’s interpretation of her grandparents’ first encounter contains religious and sexual overtones. Evelina’s grandmother, Junesse, a name readers can associate with the French word for “youth” or “young people,” performs the role of the sanctified young girl. Her frilly white dress, which is completely out of place in the chaos of the dove plague, also associates her with divine grace. Unlike the doves who flap around wildly,

Junesse is calm and graceful.19 She also acts in a traditional feminine manner, nurturing the injured boy to health and even overlooking decorum by dirtying her white sash with the boy’s blood.

Junesse’s actions are in line with conceptions of white middle-class girlhood. Like the “good girls” in Anglo-American novels, Junesse is chaste, loving, and innocent. Her only flaw is that she allows her good reputation to be tarnished when she runs away

19 Since plagues are traditionally associated with insects and other “creepy crawlies,” according to John Gamber, it is likely that Erdrich intended this image to refer to white settlement of Native lands (143). Certainly, Gamber insists, we can see how “an excessively large, migrating, white mass of life clamping down on the American landscape, overusing the land and starving out the indigenous population bears some slight similarities to Native history of the past 100 years” (144).

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with her future husband. Evelina is clearly captivated by this story of young love, and she interprets her own love with Corwin in terms of it. Evelina, however, breaks from the conventions of romantic love when she rejects Corwin in favor of her teacher:

As I walked I realized that my body still fought itself. My lungs filled with air like two bags, but every time they did so, a place underneath them squeezed so painfully the truth suddenly came clear. “I love her now,” I blurted out. I stopped on a crack in the earth, stepping on it, then stamped down hard, sickened. “Oh God, I am in love.” (47)

Evelina’s horror at loving another woman arises from the fact that it falls outside the narratives she has come to recognize. There is, she later observes, no story about loving another woman (235). While in Ojiwba culture Evelina would be identified as a gender variant, in the town of Pluto she is still subject to American norms of female subjectivity. It is Evelina’s love and her eventual acceptance of her difference that begin to re-mark her, so that as she grows into a more mature adolescent she no longer plays the role of the wily, highstrung little girl who torments potential lovers.

Erdrich provides an example of this role reversal when Evelina returns as narrator. After experiencing horrifying hallucinations from the drug slipped to her by

Corwin, Evelina volunteers at a mental institution. Once there, she meets a young white girl named Nonette, who becomes her lover. Nonette’s name, much like Junesse’s, proves to be symbolic, as the first portion translates into the French for “no.” Although

Nonette invites Evelina to love her, her mental instability makes this love impossible.

Nonette taunts Evelina and denies their relationship, and she later checks out of the mental institution without so much as acknowledging their relationship. This cat and mouse game is strikingly similar to Evelina’s childhood romance, except in this instance she becomes the victim of rejection. In her reading of the novel, Valentino argues that

Evelina conforms to a “male model of history and not a female one” (129). This is why,

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during her childhood, Evelina could not understand her love for Sister Mary Anita, and why her reaction is one of horror rather than pleasure. Similarly, Evelina is unable to understand how to react to Nonette, who does not follow the narrative patterns in the stories she was told as a girl. While Evelina struggles to develop a new story by conforming to traditional gender roles—Nonette has boyish characteristics while Evelina has girlish ones—her relationship ultimately crumbles.

Evelina’s love for Nonette is not simply gendered, but raced as well. In her history of the evolution of the tomboy, Abate explains that white tomboys were often

“tamed” because of fears about sexuality. This anxiety, according to Abate, was fueled by fear about the decline in white supremacy. Abate cites multiple historical episodes where a girl’s decision to be a tomboy appeared as a threat to white culture, and even goes so far as to serve as one of the alleged reasons for the “race suicide” of Anglo-

Americans. Abate, however, concerns herself with white tomboys who not only desire girls, as in the case of Beebo Brinker in I am A Woman (1959), but also white girls who act like non-white ones: Abate repeatedly draws parallels between white tomboys and

African American girls and women. For Evelina, race plays a crucial role in the power dynamics between herself and Nonette, and likewise serves Erdrich’s purpose of underscoring how race, gender, and sexuality are tied up in historical acts of vengeance. When Evelina reflects on her relationship with Nonette, the dejected woman remarks, “I was always too backwards, or provincial, or Catholic, or reservation- or family-bound to absorb and pull off [this life]” (241). Later, Evelina will make a direct connection between her Ojiwba heritage and her failure to secure Nonette’s love: “I’m just a nothing, half-crazy, half-drugged, half-Chippewa” (244).

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Evelina’s difference, and her subversiveness as a virgin girl, can be contrasted with Erdrich’s other virgin girl, Marn. The juxtaposition of these two demonstrates the limitations of white female subjectivity, while simultaneously drawing attention to problems associated with the virgin land myth. If the virgin land myth was intended to make innocent the colonial exploits of the United States and then bolster national pride during the 1950s, it returned once more following 9/11. During this moment, heated debates regarding race emerged as many Americans became suspicious of anyone that even vaguely resembled the hijackers responsible for the plane crashes in New York,

Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania. For Erdrich, 9/11 becomes an opportunity to return to the nation’s past treatment of Native American people. That Erdrich does not see much difference between the U.S.’s current and past policies, at least in terms of decisions driven by vengeance rather than justice, is apparent in the way she contrasts her two virgin girl figures.

While Evelina Harp challenges gender, race, and class expectations, Marn conforms to them. Marn comes from a blue-collar immigrant family who struggles to make a profit from their farm. Because she needs to help on the farm, Marn exhibits behavior that others might interpret as tomboyish. However, once she no longer has to help with family chores, Marn succumbs to traditional ideals of femininity. For example, after running off with Billy Peace, Marn submits to her husband’s authority and focuses her energy on caring for her two children. Marn’s new life is far from a model of domestic bliss, as she is constantly subjected to emotional and physical abuse. Marn cares for her children, washes clothes, and submits to her husband’s wishes. She is even treated in a nineteenth-century manner when her husband gains rights to her

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family farm: “The farm is made over to me now, and through me to Billy” (154). Billy’s ability to own his wife’s property harkens back to the days when women were treated like children, and their money and property were placed in the care of their “more rational” husbands. Marn’s willingness to submit to traditional conceptions of Anglo-

American femininity contrasts sharply with Evelina’s bucking of tradition.

Erdrich hints early on in the narrative at the role Marn’s cultural and racial background play in her behavior. When Marn determines it is time to return home for a family visit, she persuades her husband to accompany her by referring to her own upbringing:

“Your parents died when you were young,” I tell him. “Your sister raised you until you went into the army, then she went to the dogs, I guess. So you don’t really understand the idea of home, or folks, or a place you grew up in that you want to return to.” (148)

Earlier, Marn did not distinguish between her background and Billy’s; rather, she focused exclusively on her desire for this mysterious man. Now, as she grows older and develops a sense of duty, she refers to these differences and utilizes them to gain a modicum of power over her husband. Marn’s reference to Billy’s family situation shows little understanding or compassion, as is evident through her use of words such as “I guess” and the didactic nature of her speech: she “tells” Billy why he doesn’t understand her position rather than asking. Moreover, despite riffs in her own family, she nostalgically writes about her father and mother as they diligently tend to the land, referring to her father as an “overworked German” (159). This work may sap her parents of their vitality, but it is in stark contrast to Billy’s alcoholic sister. These contrasting depictions of family demonstrate Marn’s sense of racial and cultural superiority, a feeling that will strengthen once she is overrun by rage at her abusive husband.

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Marn’s background similarly draws attention to the policies that the virgin land myth was intended to obscure. Despite her family’s economic instability, the Wolde family still owns a large plot of land that was obtained at a time when land speculation led many to claim the “free” land in the North Dakota region. This land is described as being “smack up to the reservation boundary,” a fact that Marn’s husband does not fail to recognize or interpret within the history of land loss: “This was reservation, Billy says, and should be again. This was my family’s land, Indian land. Will be again” (152). While

Marn’s youth and general naivety seem to exclude her from involvement in this land theft, she is caught up in this history due to her whiteness. Marn’s racial background, much like the reddened sash of Junesse, is tainted with blood, and it is this stain that

Erdrich forces her readers to consider within the larger history of U.S. colonization.

Marn may be in the right when she is angered by Billy’s takeover of her family farm, but his desire for the land is always cast in terms of the larger history of U.S. colonization.

As his speech to Marn indicates, the land her family “owns” is rightfully “Indian land,” and it is this history of land theft that drives him to reclaim what Marn sees as her own.

Similarly, Marn’s determination to get the “land deed in her name” draws uncanny parallels to the nineteenth century frenzy over the “free” land in North Dakota, a fact that

Erdrich reminds her readers of through the narrative of Judge Coutts. In the town of

Pluto, land rights should be interpreted as a struggle between whites and Indians, making any reference to them highly racialized.

This struggle over land begins to appear as a driving force in the violence that defines Marn’s relationship with her husband, especially once Marn begins to imitate the behavior of her Uncle Warren, the man really responsible for the Pluto murders. Despite

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Marn’s submissive temperament, her family history, much like the history of U.S. colonization, begins to possess her. Much like the rages that randomly take control of her uncle, Marn similarly notes having a “rage” descend upon her (151). These rages enable the submissive Marn to lash out at her husband. In the murder scene, Marn calmly prepares a poison, and places the toxic serum in a needle that she hides behind an apple. Later, as she flees the religious commune where she lived with Billy, Marn encounters one of the other members, a white woman named Bliss. Marn tackles the woman and punctures her jacket with a steak knife that she has hidden in her hand.

Such acts starkly contrast with Marn’s earlier naïve country girl persona. Marn’s ability to strike at her enemies seems fueled by a rage that precedes her, and is indeed linked to her crazed uncle. Such a genealogical connection places the conflict between Marn and Billy into dialogue with the embittered history of the Ojiwba tribe, who likewise suffered at the hands of French fur trappers, and the white immigrants and settlers who later rushed into the west.

Through her depiction of Evelina and Marn’s maturation, Erdrich captures many of the issues that arose after 9/11 and places them into a broader historical context. By subverting the familiar tropes of the virgin girl figure, she is able to question the atmosphere of vengeance that quickly emerged in the aftermath of 9/11, and to further unravel the U.S. national myths that regained popularity at this moment in time. Erdrich challenges notions of the U.S. as native land to white settlers by returning to the broken treaties between the U.S. government and Native Americans, and by likewise reflecting on the long-term effects of these decisions. She demonstrates that those who partake in acts of violence and vengeance are haunted by them. These acts balloon outwards and

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envelope more than just the immediate victims and perpetrators. They have lasting effects that spread much like the plague of doves that serves as Erdrich’s central image in the novel. Just like the doves, whose ordinary associations with peace are inverted when they appear en mass, an act of violence initially committed in the name of justice can later blossom into horrifying acts of vengeance on a massive scale. Such acts, when placed into a global context, reveal much about the American character.

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CHAPTER 5 EXTRAORDINARY BOYS ON AN ERRAND: RACE AND NATIONAL BELONGING IN NARRATIVES OF FATHERHOOD

Now in the 1660’s the problem was this: which had New England originally been—an errand boy or a doer of errands? In which sense had it failed? Had it been dispatched for a further purpose, or was it an end in itself? Or had it fallen short not only in one or the other, but in both of the meanings? If so, it was indeed a tragedy, in the primitive sense of a fall from a mighty designation.

—Perry Miller Errand into the Wilderness

It reminds us of a significant fact: that instead of capturing our past, we have got to transcend it. As for a child who is leaving adolescence, there is no going home for America.

—Louis Hartz The Liberal Tradition in America

After such fathers, what sons? Indeed, what sons can there be?

—Richard Hofstadter The Progressive Historians

The 1950s marked a growing debate concerning the US’s role on the global stage. As the epigraphs to this chapter underscore, there was substantial anxiety regarding the nation’s future: would the US emerge as a powerful world leader, or would it founder when faced with the complicated policies that an expanded political arena would certainly introduce? At the root of these questions was a concern about national leaders and the continuing mission of America in the twentieth century, a feeling effectively captured by Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956). A guiding national myth that allowed Miller, and those familiar with his work, to reinterpret contemporary political affairs within a longer historical tradition, the errand into the wilderness myth postulated that the Founding Fathers of the nation came to the wilderness of the New World on a divine mission which they passed onto their sons. As

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a war veteran, respected scholar, and US diplomat, Miller had the prestige needed to give his “Puritan thesis” potency and political suasion. In my first chapter, I discussed how Miller’s claims regarding the challenges faced by the Puritan Fathers and their

“sons” was influenced by the fear of nuclear warfare that overshadowed US citizens during the height of the Cold War. Miller’s contribution was to raise awareness of the questionable trajectory of the nation: what would be the logical conclusion of the Puritan errand? Had the nation in fact strayed from the guiding principles that motivated the

Founder’s “errand into the wilderness”? Questions such as these would continue to erupt well into the early twenty-first century, as numerous dissidents took up the pen in order to criticize the U.S. government’s political involvement abroad.

Just as Miller’s Puritan thesis was organized by a father-son theme, so were the critiques of these later writers. Although Miller is primarily remembered as a supporter of the US government, his anxiety regarding nuclear warfare led to a number of statements that suggest his feelings were far more ambiguous. This ambiguity appeared in the work of writers who, like Miller, questioned the future of America.

Without a secure sense of the nation’s political agenda, writers could only guess about its future prospects. Yet in the familiar theme of the father-son bond they found some reassurance. Narratives of fatherhood allowed authors to express a mix of patriotic fervor and political anxiety as they explored issues pertinent to their respective generation. During the 1950s, for example, the “loss” of China and the rise of the

Nationalist party in Taiwan led to an active China lobby that kept Sino-American relations at the forefront of US foreign policy considerations. Many Americans were aware of the emerging importance of Asia following the Korean War, as this region

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became one of the new hotspots for the struggle between the US and Soviet Union. In subsequent years, other regions, including the Caribbean, gained political importance as the U.S’s war against Communism intensified and fears about national security increased.

In this chapter, I chart the emergence of a critique of a US foreign policy, a critique rooted in anxieties regarding the nation’s new position as a leader of global affairs. Structuring this decades long critique was the father-son narrative established by Miller. Much like Miller’s desperate plea regarding the nation’s errand, later critics were suspicious of political leaders and demonstrated this distrust through narratives of filial rebellion. By rejecting the so-called Fathers, future writers opened up a dialogue regarding the nation’s errand and enabled others to participate in such a critical conversation. Of central importance to these writers were issues revolving around race and national belonging. At a time when the U.S. was urging non-aligned nations to embrace democracy, concerns about who belonged in the national family were constantly being raised. The fact that most non-aligned nations consisted of a non-white peoples meant that the U.S. had to think hard about its own racist policies, including the mistreatment of its African and Native American communities.

In an effort to achieve its political goals, the U.S. presented itself as a loving father ready to adopt others into its family. This rhetoric was influential for those uncertain about the nation’s mission, and would play a crucial role in the development of critiques of U.S. foreign policy. The authors that I focus on in this chapter consider the limits of national belonging and the extent to which race defines these limits. For example, in both Meindert DeJong’s The House of Sixty Fathers (1956) and Sherman

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Alexie’s Flight (2007) white fathers adopt ethnic boys and demand that their new sons assimilate into white culture. As the boys negotiate these demands, they confront not only the power of their adoptive fathers but also that of the U.S. government. Adoptees are not the only children to appear in narratives about father-son bonds, but do play a prominent role in them. The adoptee, because he or she must be chosen for inclusion in the family, becomes an apt metaphor for the Cold War political developments in U.S. foreign policy. In another move of political dissent, Russell Banks plays with the race of the father figures that appear in his narrative, Rule of the Bone. Banks takes an alternative position on the associations of power and authority inherent in Anglo-

American constructions of fatherhood by replacing white fathers with a black one. In so doing, he suggests that white males are not necessarily preordained for positions of leadership. Despite their varied approaches, each of the authors I discuss in this chapter share a concern about U.S. foreign policy, and they express this concern by staging struggles of power between fathers and sons.

Failed Adoptions and the Love/Hate Relationship with China

During the 1950s, Asia emerged as one of the most important arenas for the ideological struggle against Communism. The establishment of the People’s Republic of

China in 1949 significantly undermined the US’s mission to contain Communism, and the media responded to these developments. The initial rhetorical strategy involved describing China’s conversion to Communism as a tragic “loss” to the U.S. However, by the time of the Vietnam War, propaganda about China had heated up. In the short documentary film Red China Battle Plan (1967), the U.S. government depicted China as an evil war-mongering country determined to “enslave” the rest of the world. The negative image of China in war propaganda like Red China Battle Plan took time to

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cultivate, since China was only a few years prior one of the United States’ allies.

Because of China’s critical role in the Second World War, its sudden conversion to

Communism was difficult to negotiate. Such popular documentaries as the Why We

Fight series, which the celebrated Hollywood filmmaker Frank Capra directed, included films devoted to U.S. activity in China. China was presented as a nation much like our own, with plenty of land and resources to care for its vast population. The Japanese, who were cast as China’s greedy and demonic neighbors, needed to be stopped if

American ideals were to prevail. China needed U.S. sympathy in the years of the

Second World War, and the U.S. needed China in order to assert its power. It is hard to believe that such a union would go sour so quickly.

The US’s shifting position in Asia was largely motivated by the Korean War, which reinforced policymakers’ sense of the importance of Asia in the war against

Communism. In addition, an active China lobby during the 1950s raised awareness in the general public about issues in Asia and urged politicians to take them seriously.

While the US’s commitments were often split between democratic experiments like

South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, there were earlier developments that would set the tone for future investments in the Pacific region. This began with what Nancy Bernkopf

Tucker describes as a “growing sense that the Chinese were not doing enough for themselves to merit outside assistance” (10). The US’s flagging interest in China was further problematized by the Chinese civil war, which lasted from 1927 until 1950. As

China split due to political differences, the US would also become increasingly divided about its position in Asia. Ultimately, the US would side with the losing Kuomintang

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(KMT) forces led by Chiang Kai-Shek, and would funnel enormous amounts of US aid to steel Taiwan against a possible invasion from mainland China.

While China was not the only Asian nation of interest to the US during the 1950s, it remained an integral component of the US’s strategy in the Pacific region. As the rhetoric regarding China evolved, the Chinese were often cast as children in need of help, and the United States was the confident and clever father who could best care for this troubled nation. This was true for mainland Chinese during the Second World War, and then later for Chinese refugees in Taiwan. Father-son rhetoric permeated some of the most popular materials being disseminated to U.S. citizens about China—even the very youngest citizens. One popular novel that received wide acclaim was Meindert

DeJong’s The House of Sixty Fathers (1956). DeJong, a world-renowned children’s author, received the Newbery Honor book award for this particular book. He would later receive the coveted Hans Christian Andersen Award, an international award given to an author whose entire body of work is seen as making a “lasting contribution to children’s literature” (“Hans Christian Andersen Awards”). The first American author to win the award, DeJong’s work went on to receive recognition in several foreign countries.

DeJong notes in his only recorded interview, “I’ve been translated in about 22 languages, so somewhere something is selling” (A Conversation).

Of the many books that DeJong wrote during his lifetime, The House of Sixty

Fathers is the most autobiographical. It recounts DeJong’s experience in China as a soldier during the Second World War, and his subsequent efforts to adopt a Chinese war orphan. Dedicated to “little, lost Panza,” the boy that DeJong’s unit cared for and that DeJong himself attempted to adopt officially after returning home, the novel

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provides a fictional account of Panza and DeJong’s relationship during the Japanese invasion of China. What is most striking about this account is the way that it romanticizes the union between the U.S. military and the Chinese people. In the novel,

DeJong manipulates the real events of little Panza’s life, providing a happy ending where he is reunited with his parents through the efforts of a US soldier. In contrast to the happy ending of the Chinese boy, who is named Tien Pao, Panza’s fate is significantly darker: dumped in an orphanage when DeJong’s troop returned home, the boy was never again in contact with DeJong due to growing tensions between the US and China. DeJong’s sudden abandonment of little Panza had less to do with his affection for the child and more with China’s emergence as a Communist country.

DeJong gave up his efforts at this point and left the boy to his fate.

A sad, almost melodramatic story, DeJong’s real interactions with Panza are difficult to trace with real accuracy—the story is primarily used by publishers to promote the book—and yet it casts some important light on the fictional narrative that DeJong constructs in The House of Sixty Fathers. The novel, like the real-life story of DeJong and little Panza, is about an adoption gone awry. In this case, however, it is the child who refuses the adoption. Tien Pao’s unwillingness to give up on his family and accept his impending assimilation into U.S. culture is a theme that is unusually complex for a

1950s children’s book.1 DeJong uses Tien Pao’s negotiation of his loyalties to his biological and adoptive fathers in order to question the father-son relationship that became essential to the U.S.’s propaganda efforts during its war campaign in China.

Echoing the famous documentary film series, DeJong seems to ask, “Why do we fight?”

1 Despite the rise in radical children’s literature produced by authors on the Left, much of the mainstream literature for children was staunchly conservative.

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DeJong wrote his novel while still serving in China, although it was not published until the mid-1950s.2 The delay in publication allowed DeJong to make correlations between the Cold War atmosphere and his experiences abroad. Having observed firsthand the US military’s interactions with the Chinese people, and the subsequent breakdown in communications between US citizens and Chinese institutions, DeJong was primed to respond to the wealth of media coverage regarding China’s new red status. Most importantly, we need to recall the rhetoric that appeared shortly after the culmination of the Pacific War, when millions of orphaned children became subjects of public sympathy. Organizations like the Christian Children’s Fund encouraged US citizens to do their part and provide a loving home for these children, thereby placing them in the protective fold of the US nation. According to Christina Klein, these advertisements informed U.S. citizens that they could “adopt” a Chinese war orphan by donating as little as ten dollars a month (46). Advertisements such as these, Klein adds,

“make purchasing a political act, and purchasing the idea of the family becomes a mechanism for creating ties between the United States and Asia” (49). “Adopting” a child thus fulfilled the new demand for US citizens to do their part on a world stage. This approach to adoption, while flawed in many respects, is an example of the United

States’ shifting approach to international relations in Asia during a time when many believed that Asia had become the new battleground in the war against Communism.

The adoption rhetoric that appeared in the 1950s may very well have influenced

DeJong. While much could be said of the personal impact of the images of Chinese war

2 In a commemorative piece in The Horn Book, Judith Hartzell writes, “Believing that war books sell best during wartime, Mick tried to send the manuscript from China to his editors at Harper in 1945. It was intercepted at the border by an Air Force censor who returned it, saying ‘it would give aid and comfort to the enemy.’ This amused Mick greatly: the book came entirely from his imagination” (232).

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orphans that flooded the US media, a similar rhetoric of family ties also compelled other forms of inquiry in regard to the nation’s future. Suggesting that Chinese children, and even China as a whole, could potentially join the US “family” returns us to the familiar territory carved out by Miller’s Puritan thesis. As US citizens were advised to be open to the metaphorical adoption of the Chinese, others reasonably considered the nature of the US’s world mission: what was its relation to the mission of the Founding Fathers?

Was the US still staying true to its founding principles? What was the logical conclusion of the nation’s “errand into the wilderness”? In DeJong’s novel, as well as many later critics, these questions inevitably led to an engagement with the issues of race and national belonging.

In The House of Sixty Fathers, much of Tien Pao’s experience revolves around his strained relationship with his biological father and his fascination with a white

American soldier, who serves as his father substitute and eventually his adoptive father.

The rift between Tien Pao and his biological father begins when the boy disobeys the man in order to fulfill the white soldier’s request for a ferry ride across the river. Tien

Pao, encouraged by a neighbor woman, decides to ignore his father’s mandate to stay at the dock; he believes that his act of defiance, which will be rewarded with “much yen” by the American soldier (11), will be forgiven once his family sees the money he receives in exchange for his services. DeJong uses this incident to cast Tien Pao’s biological father (the “bad” dark father) in a negative light, while the soldier (the “good” white father) is initially taken as infallible. Young Tien Pao initially mistakes the soldier for a river deity. While his own father has done much to be admired, risking his life to keep his family safe from Japanese bullets, Tien Pao quickly forgets these actions as he

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becomes enamored with his new friend’s striking looks: “It must be a river god! His hair was golden, and his face was white. In that white face were pale-blue eyes. People had dark hair, dark eyes! It must be the river god!” (9). Tien Pao is also fascinated with the soldier’s competence at rowing the sampan, as well as his generosity with money.

This first encounter between Tien Pao and the white soldier serves as a modified version of Freud’s family romance, where a young child imagines that he is really adopted and that somewhere a better family waits for him. DeJong uses this fantasy narrative as a way of returning to his concern with U.S.-China relations. Even in this first encounter, DeJong already casts doubt upon the viability of such a happy union. Tien

Pao, the child who stands in for “innocent” civilians, is caught between loyalties. The entrance of this new white father upsets what had been previously a happy, albeit struggling family unit. The soldier’s good intentions, DeJong shows, results in misfortune for the young child, and launches a train of events that will involve both the

American soldier and the Chinese boy. As the narrative progresses, the suffering of both parties casts further doubt on the benefit of a union between the United States and

China. The soldier suffers from a terrible wound after crash landing during a Japanese air raid, and he must depend on Tien Pao in order to escape from the enemy. Such a reversal of power deflates the image of the once invincible American soldier; it also draws attention to the risks of involving oneself in foreign affairs.

Carol Singley maintains in Adopting America (2011) that adoption is a common trope in American literature, which dates back as far as the contact period when the first

European settlers considered themselves orphans in a new land. “Adoption narratives,”

Singley notes, “are rooted in the American migratory experience: they reflect politically

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and culturally the severed ties to Great Britain and the construction of new forms of social and governmental organization” (4). Singley provides several examples of the adoption narrative that span from the Puritan era to the end of the nineteenth century.

Early adoption narratives, such as Cotton Mather’s “Orphanotrophium; or, Orphans well- provided for” (1711), depict adoption as part of everyday life, and encourage parents “to prepare spiritually for the possibility of their children’s orphancy” (Singley 24).

Eighteenth century adoption narratives still contain some practical advice regarding adoption, but some, such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791), also use adoption to raise questions relating to roots and national identity. Nineteenth century adoption narratives continue to use adoption as a metaphor for the nation. In all these narratives, a child’s successful adoption signified “the resourcefulness of the heroine and the flexibility of the family in the context of national expansion” (Singley 152).

Singley demonstrates the way that these various narratives responded to the immediate concerns of the nation, both in terms of social life and in terms of national politics. Yet, with the exception of her final chapter, Singley does not explore in much detail the relationship between the adoption narrative and empire-building practices.

Authors, as she notes in passing in chapters on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men (1871) and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), at times used the adoption trope in order to depict who was not allowed into the national family. Moreover, narratives from the early twentieth century, most notably Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917), address the limitations of adoption and include portraits of unhappy adoptees. The shift in the adoption narrative at the beginning of the twentieth century, I would argue, occurs as a response to the U.S.’s increase in global power. The adoption trope is adapted to reflect the

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political and cultural tension associated with the U.S.’s increasing involvement with foreign nations. Post-World War II narratives, such as DeJong’s The House of Sixty

Fathers, share with prior adoption narratives a concern about the reorganization of social ties and governmental institutions; however, they add to this an awareness of the

U.S. as a major player in the global scene and attempt to understand the repercussions of these new ways of relating with the rest of the world.

While much of protagonist Tien Pao’s journey in The House of Sixty Fathers is devoted to questioning the father-son bond, it is his time in the “House of Sixty Fathers” that best exemplifies DeJong’s appropriation of the adoption trope to navigate the growing tension between the U.S. and China. When Tien Pao is rescued by another

American soldier and carried off to his base, he happily succumbs to the strength of his new foreign friends. Indeed, he finds it comforting: “When Tien Pao came to again, one of the soldiers was holding him in big, steady arms and carrying him down the steep path. It felt good to be held” (130). DeJong’s description of the American soldier supports the United States’ new perception of itself as a strong nation with the power to

“save” others. This moment of comfort is disrupted as Tien Pao enters the Air Force base and is overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of the white men. The boy is disturbed by the men’s appearance and their voices, but this discomfort is relieved when a Chinese interpreter informs him that the men “feel like fathers to you” (132-133;

136). The boy is giddy, feeling “all of a sudden…so light and wonderful—so safe” (137).

Believing that “no one could hurt him here—not among sixty white airmen,” Tien Pao relaxes.

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While the U.S. airmen feel a special bond with Tien Pao, they are not yet his legal guardians. As the interpreter notes, the airmen only “feel like fathers”—they are not his fathers in actuality. However, DeJong already initiates a dialogue about U.S. intervention even in these early stages. The airmen’s interest in Tien Pao parallels the

U.S.’s rising interest in Asia and the government’s desire to bring Asian powers such as

China into the national family. Christina Klein argues in her essay on the U.S. government’s political discourse regarding Asia during the Cold War that the 1950s marked a rapid rise in U.S. citizens’ interest in the events taking place in Asian countries. This interest, as Klein contends, was in part a response to a demand for the

U.S. to take up the mantle of global leadership. War propaganda such as Henry Luce’s seminal “The American Century” (1941) urged American citizens to support U.S. involvement in World War II, because it was the nation’s duty as a world leader. Such responsibility was often articulated in terms of family ties, and U.S. citizens were encouraged to think about Asia as part of their international family. With the image of the powerful U.S. soldiers cradling the wounded Tien Pao, DeJong reflects popular attitudes regarding Asia. His representation of the interaction between soldier and war orphan supports the rhetoric popular at the time and indicates that the relationship between the two is mutually beneficial: the soldiers are able to fulfill their duty as world leaders and Tien Pao is protected from the bullets of the Japanese and the dangers of starvation.

DeJong contrasts this scene of warmth, safety, and comfort with the fear and anxiety associated with an unwanted adoption. As the U.S. soldiers shift from being father figures to adoptive fathers, the once happy union between the boy and the

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airmen goes sour. Tien Pao, although initially thrilled with the idea of having sixty fathers to care for him, is crushed when he discovers that the men are no longer “like fathers” but his real adoptive fathers. In a conversation with the U.S. military’s interpreter, Tien Pao rejects his new fathers and the privilege that goes along with being an American adoptee:

“I don’t want sixty fathers,” Tien Pao exploded. “I have a father and mother….Oh, I’m not ungrateful,” he added hastily. “But don’t you understand? I have a father and mother, and I must find them and the baby sister. I have to find them!” (146-147)

DeJong depicts a situation in which U.S. intervention is in fact harmful, and thereby calls into question the U.S.’s “exceptional” status and the propaganda that declared that it was the nation’s duty to intervene in conflicts abroad. The bond that Tien Pao began forming with his new fathers was only satisfactory so long as it was temporary, so long as the airmen were only “like fathers.” Once the airmen overstep this boundary and become legal guardians, the child is outraged and defends his old family ties.

Tien Pao’s rejection of his new family hints at the imperial undertones of U.S. involvement in foreign affairs. Tien Pao, the weak and helpless Chinese boy, is dependent in almost every way upon his white fathers: they feed, clothe, and shelter him. Moreover, as a child, he has no legal control over his body. On a whim the airmen gain legal control of the boy, with no thought for his real family. Perry Nodelman points out a disturbing relationship between the way children and colonial subjects are treated.

Nodelman’s claims are fitting in the case of Tien Pao. Both a child and the citizen of a nation under the influence of a powerful world leader, Tien Pao is an example of new forms of colonialism taking place as part of the United States’ newfound mission. As

Tien Pao’s experience shows, adoption can at first seem welcome, but once the new

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adoptee is forced to assimilate, it becomes constricting. For example, the airmen’s interpreter demands that the boy conform to U.S. expectations regarding child behavior:

“Now, you are not to run outdoors naked! Your sixty fathers would be horrified” (146). At varying moments, Tien Pao is scolded and told how to eat, dress, and act. A good

American adoptee does not cry nor refuses the gifts from his new fathers, he is told, nor does he allow his pet pig to sleep inside with him.

Tien Pao’s response to his new fathers challenges the “sentimental discourse of familial love without national boundaries, which became popular in the United States during the Cold War” (Choy and Choy 264). Through the challenges of the airmen’s new fatherhood, DeJong demonstrates the difficulty of navigating cultural differences. The airmen must rely on the doctor and the interpreter to communicate with Tien Pao, and even then they often fail to understand the child’s emotional needs. At times these incidents provide some much-needed comic relief for the dark narrative, such as when

Tien Pao swallows a piece of gum and rubs his belly as a sign of satisfaction despite his confusion about the candy’s purpose (128-129). At other times, however, they are heartbreaking: when Tien Pao first wakes in the barracks of the U.S. military base, he is presented with a tray of food only to have it quickly taken away. The soldier who removes the plate does so because he is unsure if Tien Pao’s malnourished body can handle the rich food, but the child cannot understand and cries hysterically out of rage and frustration (139). These moments of miscommunication show that familial love does indeed have its limits, and that it is not always possible to overcome cultural differences through love and goodwill alone.

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DeJong’s purpose in appropriating the adoption trope is not simply to critique the

United States’ intervention in the Sino-Japan war, but rather to seek out a possible solution to the political and cultural differences that threatened successful U.S.-China relations. While Tien Pao’s adoption fails, DeJong attempts to find a satisfactory alternative to adoption. In a surprising turnabout, DeJong ends with Tien Pao being returned to his biological family, while his favorite U.S. soldier, Lieutenant Hamsun, stands happily by the family’s side during the reunion: “There sat the lieutenant half turned, and he did not understand what his [Tien Pao’s] mother had said. Ah, but he did understand. He understood! The heart understands without words” (189). In a narrative rife with cultural misunderstandings, DeJong’s final words convey a hopeful image of

Tien Pao’s old and new families being brought together. Reflecting on these final words,

Judith Hartzell recalls a conversation with DeJong regarding his conclusion: “Mick loved the last chapter. ‘Isn’t that something?’ he asked me. ‘And the last line is perfect. “The heart understands without words.” Anything more would have been anticlimactic’” (232-

233). The ending evokes the sentimental discourse that DeJong rejected earlier. Rather than finding a rational way to overcome cultural differences, DeJong resorts to a solution that involves the heart.

The ending of The House of Sixty Fathers challenges the novel’s message in the adoption scene. Taken out of context, the author’s change of heart makes little sense.

Yet it is important to keep in mind that DeJong is drawing upon the well-worn formula of the adoption narrative. Even though adoptees in nineteenth and twentieth century

American novels often suffer greatly before finding happiness, they are rewarded in the end. Tien Pao’s journey conforms to this formula and draws upon the sentimental roots

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of the narrative form. Early accounts of adoption in such popular nineteenth century novels as Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Susan Cummins’s

The Lamplighter (1854) depict a journey of spiritual renewal that involves the protagonist’s suffering: many tears are shed over the loss of the biological family and the painful process of integrating into a new family. Tears become the pretext for spiritual cleansing as the young girls that star in these domestic novels learn to conform to what Barbara Welter has called the “cult of true womanhood.” Because Tien Pao is not white, female, or middle class, his happy ending has a very different set of implications. The image of the happy family in DeJong’s novel mixes old and new, suggesting that some middle ground between adoption—a process that appears too similar to colonization in DeJong’s depiction of it—and abandonment might be possible.

As can be seen from my analysis of the novel, the adoption trope became a useful tool for critiquing the US’s global mission during the Cold War. Framed in terms of the father-son bonds first used by Miller in Errand into the Wilderness, authors like

DeJong question the US’s right to intervene in foreign affairs. In the context of DeJong’s service experience, the nation’s errand appears at first benevolent, as the soldiers aid the helpless Chinese, and only later as imperialistic, as they then abuse their power and begin to coerce those placed in their protection to assimilate. Revealing the anxiety that many felt about the nation’s future, The House of Sixty Fathers dramatizes the power dynamics between the US and foreign nations. It raises questions about the risks to both parties, and poses a scenario in which US invention might in fact stray from the ideals espoused by policymakers. If as the popular rhetoric of the time suggested, Asia could be a part of the national family, then how might this adoption process play out?

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What are the limitations of the familial relationship, and how might they in turn trouble the original mission passed down by the Puritan Founders? While DeJong does not offer a viable solution to the problems facing the US as an emergent world power, he does contribute to a growing trend whereby the nation’s errand is challenged.

“Going Native”: White Guilt, Illegal Aliens, and the Problems of Black Fatherhood

The ambiguity of the US’s world mission at the start of the 1950s opened a space where the errand into the wilderness took on a renewed relevancy for citizens: it presented an avenue for honoring the US’s unique history, while also probing into the decisions that culminated in the US’s position of world leadership. With traumatic historical events like the bombing of Hiroshima in recent memory, authors such as

DeJong understood the potential consequences of US decisions and the effect that they had on the world community.

This new consciousness continued in the years after the 1989 fall of the Berlin

Wall, a period that led to renewed possibilities for those critical of the US’s past actions.

The actions of the recent Reagan administration became a major target for these critics.

Reagan ushered in a new era of Cold War conflict, ending the period known as

“détente.” Reagan made decisions that increased the US’s involvement in global affairs, sometimes inciting harsh international criticism. For example, when he consulted British

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher regarding the New Jewel Movement in Grenada,

Thatcher suggested that Reagan stay out of the situation. Reagan would ignore her advice and invaded the island on October 25, 1983. Actions such as these characterized Reagan’s terms as president, and they renewed the Cold War rhetoric about the nation’s duty to “preserve” democracy in “oppressed” nations. Likewise, these actions resurrected old anxieties about the limits of US intervention in foreign affairs,

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and the extent to which the nation’s commitment to democracy implied the necessity of

US involvement in international crises. Military initiatives such as the invasion of

Grenada were symbolic of the US’s growing power and confidence in controlling world events. As Thatcher herself remarked following Reagan’s proposal to invade, “I cannot conceal that I am deeply disturbed by your latest communication. You asked for my advice. I have set it out and hope that even at this late stage you will take it into account before events are irrevocable” (qtd. in Wapshott 202).

Thatcher’s words to Reagan also might characterize homegrown dissent, as in the case of Russell Banks’ eighth novel, Rule of the Bone (1995). As one of the leading novelists of the 1990s, Banks emerged as a formidable critic of the US’s continued involvement in Caribbean affairs. The novel follows the adventures of fourteen-year-old

Chapman Dorset, a troubled youth who runs away from home and ends up involved in the drug trade in Montego Bay, Jamaica. In the process of escaping the drudgery of his daily life, Chapman, aka Chappie and Bone, meets a series of father figures, the most important of which is a black Rastaman known as I-Man.3 Banks utilizes this relationship to underscore the corruption inherent in white patriarchy, and also suggest the limitations of expanding the national “family.” Drawing upon the popular myth of the

“errand into the wilderness,” Banks uses father figures to challenge the nation’s evolving errand.

In the case of the Caribbean, a concern about the spread of Communist regimes led to a series of interventions with a large impact. By returning to the figure of the

3 Those familiar with Banks’ work might recall that Banks’ earlier novel, Book of Jamaica (1980), also involved the movement of the white protagonist (in this case an adult) between U.S. and Jamaican culture.

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father, Banks investigates the power associated with fathers in the American tradition.

As in the case of Miller’s Puritan thesis, the father not only sets a standard for future generations, he institutes principles intended to guide his family and secure the survival of future generations. The survival of his progeny is determined by their ability to continue to carry out the errand bestowed upon them. As a figure often associated with the nation’s founders and future leaders, the father symbolizes the power and authority bestowed upon men as a result of their gender, race, and class. In Rule of the Bone,

Banks probes the complex relationship between power and whiteness through the coming-of-age story of an adolescent white boy, who rejects his biological and adoptive fathers and accepts instead a black father substitute.

By introducing a boy who challenges his relationship with his white fathers,

Banks suggests that those in positions of authority are not necessarily qualified to lead.

Rather than using such a scenario to critique parenting, Banks turns to issues related to race and contemporary US foreign relations. Most importantly, he questions the US’s imperialistic actions in the Caribbean. These critiques are most easily noticed in the relationship that protagonist Chappie develops with a black Rastaman known as I-Man.

Readers are first introduced to I-Man after the young boy runs away from home and completes a series of adventures with his best friend, Russ. Disgusted with his sexually abusive stepfather Ken and his weak-willed mother, Chappie determines to lead a life of crime rather than subject himself to the authority of corrupt adults. After weeks of wildly gallivanting with his best friend, Chappie is forced to continue his adventures alone.

Depressed by Russ’s determination to return home—a decision he interprets as abandonment—Chappie searches for a new living situation and settles on an

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abandoned yellow school bus in the local junkyard. It is at this point that Chappie literally trips over the man that will guide much of his remaining journey. I-Man, much like the American Adam, appears as if he comes out of nowhere.4 In fact, the only details Bone provides about I-Man’s origins are that “he’d come up from Jamaica in

April with a crew of migrant farmworkers” and that he’d “walked” when he discovered that he couldn’t “practice his religion” on the farm (155-156). Although he knows little about I-Man’s past, Chappie quickly comes to view this mysterious character as a father figure.

In creating a situation in which Bone comes into contact with a black father figure, Banks is able to question the authority associated with fatherhood and its racial connotations. Often described as irresponsible, black fathers are frequently at the center of contemporary discussions of fatherhood. In an emotional speech during his campaign for the US presidency, Barack Obama declared, “They [black fathers] have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it” (qtd. in Bosman). Banks reverses these assumptions, and in a narrative rife with irresponsible white fathers, Chappie’s new father figure appears ideal. Banks carefully crafts I-Man as a positive role model by withholding details about his former life as a poor man in Jamaica, who, in search of a source of income, is driven to drug dealing. By focusing on the present, Banks is able to underscore I-Man’s positive attributes, including his spirituality and proclivity for nurturing others. Like the garden that he grows in the junkyard, I-Man nurtures the weak

4 As Jim O’Laughlin argues, Bone’s journey is patterned after Mark Twain’s the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) (36). Another equally important influence, however, is Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1881-1882). References to Whitman’s masterpiece appear in I-Man’s very name and in Bone’s determination to discover “I-self.”

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and abused Bone and teaches him valuable skills. In addition, he provides spiritual guidance and instructs Bone in the Rastafarian way. Such lessons require Bone to learn about black history, particularly about how the slave trade led to many of the rules of

Rastafarianism. The most important of these rules requires practitioners to abstain from alcoholic beverages “due to the connection between rum and slavery days” (155).

Banks places the budding father-son relationship within familiar terms by drawing upon middle class conventions of fatherhood. I-Man’s actions in the school bus portion of the narrative, particularly his nurturing disposition, depict him as a version of the ideal father figure that emerged between the First and Second World Wars. The “New

Fatherhood,” as it was called, encouraged fathers to take a more loving approach to parenting and to become more actively involved in their children’s lives (Griswold 88).

Simply being a breadwinner under this new logic was insufficient to make men good fathers. The turn away from more authoritarian models of parenting had a lot to do with the increasing popularity of psychological theory in the United States, along with the child studies movement of the 1920s. Inspired by the new child “experts,” fathers began to accept that their presence in the household was not only important but necessary for their child’s proper emotional development. Children needed fathers, experts claimed, to properly develop their personalities. Drawing on Ernest Burgess’s sociological studies of family life, experts insisted that a child’s proper emotional development depended on the father’s presence, which aided in the child’s “interpersonal relations and sex-role socialization” (Griswold 94).

By drawing upon these older conceptions of fatherhood, Banks is able to trouble the boundary between white and black fatherhood. As the initial events of Chappie’s

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adventures underscore, race has little to do with one’s ability to successfully parent.

Chappie’s stepfather is a lazy alcoholic who takes pleasure in sexually abusing his stepchild; and Chappie’s biological father is a conman who abandoned his young son.

Neither of the two white fathers that appear in the novel therefore fulfill middle-class standards of fatherhood, a fact that challenges the racial coding of these standards. In contrast to these white fathers, I-Man fulfills the criteria of a good father. He listens carefully to Chappie’s needs and provides him with skills to survive in a world where corruption is rampant. I-Man provides valuable guidance in areas such as emotional and spiritual development that are seen as imperative to the growth of a well-adjusted child. Under his care, Chappie gains confidence and begins to control his anger and desires. Chappie even notes these changes when he declares how his new chores

“made me feel independent” (162), and he views the days he spent with I-Man during his days in the junkyard garden as the happiest ones of his life (164). Chappie’s realization parallels that of the reader, who can recognize the deep contrast between

Chappie’s old and new living situations. Even though Chappie lacks a traditional home, he has the love that his parents failed to provide him in his former life.

In his presentation of the loving bond that Chappie forms with I-Man, Banks suggests the possibility of overcoming the racial issues that dominated during the Cold

War. As areas around the world began rapidly to decolonize in the 1960s, a large population of non-white people were experiencing the possibility for the first time of forming their own governments. This proved to be an especially jarring change for the

United States, whose concerns about the susceptibility of emerging nations to

Communism motivated many of its actions in developing nations. In an effort to prevent

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the spread of Communism, the US attempted to woo these nation’s leaders and put them on a path towards democracy. At a time when fears of the spread of Communism were high, rhetoric that promoted familial love and the inclusion of others within the family circle became critical. Not only was the family a central building block for smaller relief efforts, it also served as a metaphor for the nation’s grander designs. Just as real families might adopt a war orphan from impoverished and war-torn nations and pass democratic values onto this child, so too might the US government involve itself in world events that might lead to the friendly ties and the “adoption” of a nation into the expanding US sphere of influence.

The problem with this family rhetoric was that it overlooked the fact that race was often a roadblock to national belonging. As much as the media attempted to present the

US as a benevolent father who accepts all of its “children,” there were too many contradictions between the national rhetoric and lived experience. Thomas Borstelmann notes in The Cold War and the Color Line (2001) that the continuing mistreatment of the

African American community was a terrible embarrassment for the US government, whose authority to intervene in the affairs of recently decolonized nations was limited due to its racist domestic policies. The fact that foreign diplomats of color could not even visit the US without bodyguards, due to the very real possibility of being attacked due to their skin color, was testament to the pervasiveness of racism in the 1960s.

Borstelmann provides several examples of the sticky situations that “the color line” created for the US government as it struggled to intervene in the politics of emerging nations. For example, during the Second World War, the Axis powers “eagerly brandished every report of racial discrimination in the United States as evidence of

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American hypocrisy and the hollowness of Allied rhetoric about democracy and freedom” (Borstelmann 36). Borstelmann explains that even though the Axis powers committed their own human rights crimes, the propaganda was effective since it “did not need to enter the realm of fiction to weaken American claims to moral superiority” (36).

As stories of racism in America reached the ears of the nonwhite majority abroad, suspicion grew in regard to the US’s motives. Penny Von Eschen similarly addresses the importance of racism in US Cold War politics. Von Eschen argues that following the onset of the Korean War, US policymakers began to concern themselves more with foreign policy in Asia and Africa, due largely to “fears that resentment of American racism might cause Asian and African peoples to seek closer relations with the Soviet

Union” (113).

The troubles in the US’s domestic and foreign policies are reflected in the bonds that begin to form between I-Man and Chappie, and are further cemented as the characters expand their makeshift family. While the primary focus of the novel is on the relationship between Chappie (who now refers to himself as Bone) and I-Man, the two also include in their family circle a little abused girl named Froggy. Froggy, sold into the sex trade by her mother, flourishes under I-Man’s care much like Chappie. However, even in this idyllic picture of racial harmony, there is some acknowledgement of the challenges that race poses when forming alternative kinship bonds. As Chappie indicates on multiple occasions, the appearance of a black Jamaican with two young white children is an unusual sight, especially for the nearly all-white community of

Plattsburgh, New York. Perhaps the most suggestive of Chappie’s comments is when the boy remarks that travelling unseen to the local grocery store is “good”: “I think we

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would’ve stood out, a little girl and a black Rastafarian with dreadlocks and a white kid although without my Mohawk I wasn’t as obvious as before. Still, it was the combination” (164).

As Banks explores ways to bridge the racial divide that marked the Cold War period, he relies on the familiar trope of the garden in order to create a safe space where a new family might form, a family not defined by genealogical bias. I-Man’s garden becomes a racially innocent space, where the white child embraces the black father. Bone’s narrative reaffirms the racial innocence of the garden when he comments on a memory of I-Man holding hands with Froggy. As Bone watches the two traverse the garden hand-in-hand, he declares that the two “made a real nice picture” (160). The picture that Bone observes is one common in nineteenth-century American literature, a connection that Bone does not fail to make as he recalls a book he read for a seventh grade school report. The book happens to be Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s

Cabin, a novel whose main characters, Uncle Tom and Little Eva, continue to be famous examples of interracial friendship. In her analysis of the novel’s reception, Robin

Bernstein argues that Little Eva and Uncle Tom’s relationship simply reaffirms racial division rather than breaking down this barrier. Since innocence has historically been coded white, the white child became a useful mechanism for nineteenth-century

Americans who were interested in either justifying slavery or ignoring it altogether:

“What childhood innocence helped Americans to assert by forgetting, to think about by performing obliviousness, was not only whiteness but also racial difference constructed against whiteness” (8). The practice of co-opting innocence in order to forget racial difference continues to influence authors who write about interracial friendships. These

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children, because they have yet to grow up and understand racial difference, can be friends as long as they remain “racially innocent.”

It is this very conceit of racial innocence, or the process by which

“childhood…enable[s] divergent political positions each to appear natural, inevitable, and therefore justified” (Bernstein 4), that Banks objects to and seeks to circumvent in his narrative. He does this first by rejecting conventional notions of childhood, particularly the belief that children, especially white children, are inherently innocent.

Banks has spoken publicly about his views of childhood innocence. In an interview for

The Paris Review, Banks remarks that authors like J.D. Salinger “believe in innocence” whereas he does not:

I have a hard time imagining such a thing, mainly because I don’t think that I believe in innocence. Salinger thinks of childhood differently than I do, as if the main threat to childhood is knowledge of adult life. Whereas I think that the main threat to children has more to do with power, adult power and the misuse and abuse of it. (66)

Banks is quick to call attention to the fragility of the happy family he creates in the garden. Even Bone, who still wants to believe in childhood innocence, negates his claim that “I’d found a real home and a real family,” with the recognition “But it wasn’t a real family” (167). Bone’s statements signals that despite his wish to the contrary, racism will threaten the group’s survival, even if this threat comes from the outside world. As Bone will later comment: “I was only a kid myself and an outlaw and I-Man was a Jamaican illegal alien trying to get by and eventually get home without getting busted by the

American government” (167). As Banks acknowledges in The Paris Review interview, it is power that threatens children more than knowledge of the world around them. Even if

Bone were innocent enough to be unaware of the government agencies that had power

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over the bodies of his family, these same agencies would eventually find and break up his family unit.

Bone inadvertently becomes an agent of his new family’s destruction.

Disheartened by their chances for survival, Bone decides to return home. Before he can do so, however, he must first care for his new family members and, to the best of his ability, secure their safety. His concern for the others, especially Froggy, results in a reversal of power similar to that which occurs in DeJong’s The House of Sixty Fathers.

Because I-Man refuses to assert his authority as adult and father figure, Bone steps up and takes his place as the “father” of the little family. Bone’s taking up of the mantle of power will end up being both liberating and destructive. Like his adoptive father, Ken,

Bone will make decisions that hurt his family members. Bone’s entanglement with the very social forces that he seeks to evade end up jeopardizing his new family’s safety— in fact, Froggy and I-Man both die as a result of Bone’s decisions. Banks uses Bone’s failures to further develop his thesis on power. Each time Bone fails and hurts a member of his idealized interracial family, he confronts a system of power that privileges white males. In this system, Bone can grow up to be the authority figure, something neither Froggy nor I-Man can manage to do. This is why, as Clare Bradford remarks in

Unsettling Narratives (2007), comparing (white) children to colonized subjects is problematic: white children grow up and gain power as full citizens, whereas the colonialized subject will never have access to this power (7).

The first half of Rule of the Bone is largely dedicated to dismantling older-

American conceptions of family. In addition to portraying the white family as broken,

Banks suggests that alternative family models, such as those grounded in kinship

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relations, might be possible. Although this vision of an alternative family ultimately dissolves, it provides an alternative to the system of authority in the white middle-class family. Importantly, a black father figure rather than a white one leads this family, demonstrating that the family can survive without the leadership of a white male.

Countering both racist stereotypes about black fathers and the assumptions undergirding US imperialism, Banks’ narrative shows how deeply engrained are racial assumptions in the nation’s “errand.” In the second half of his novel, Banks continues to challenge the racial undertones of the nation’s errand, and further examine the Cold

War iterations of the ongoing mission to expand the reaches of democracy. The removal of Chappie from his home in upstate New York to the predominately black community of Montego Bay, Jamaica serves as the stage for Banks’ critique of US Cold

War policies, particularly those of the Reagan and first Bush administration.

Commies in the Caribbean: A Critique of the Reagan Administration

As Banks continues to develop his critique of Cold War America, he draws upon associations of power inherent in the figure of the white father. Indeed, the father’s association with power and authority are rooted in the complex father-son relationships that appear in the novel. In her study of early American childhood, Anna Mae Duane provides some contextualization to the multiple meanings of fatherhood in the Anglo-

American tradition. She explains that literature such as Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha

(1680) defended “the long-standing hypothesis that equated fathers with rulers and children with subjects” (Suffering Childhood 29). Other forms of literature, including the popular captivity narrative, “reenact[ed] the confrontation between the rigid father and the rebellious, but overpowered child” (Duane 39). John Locke also weighed in on the issue, “insist[ing] that fathers must watch over their offspring” (Duane 130). Duane

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comments that Locke’s position differed from other representations of fatherhood in that his position actually “empowers the child—making the patriarch more guardian than ruler” (130).

In the second half of Rule of the Bone, Banks continues to draw upon the associations of father-son bonds in the Anglo-American tradition. Much like the more authoritarian and overbearing father in early American literature, the white father in

Banks’ narrative serves as a site of resistance for his offspring. Upon arriving in

Jamaica, Chappie discovers his biological father, a development that will challenge his sense of loyalty to his father substitute, I-Man. As he struggles with his sense of obligation to his biological father and his fondness for his friend and guardian, Chappie unveils a system of power that privileges white male authority. Chappie learns that a few rich white men rule the island, and that white tourists similarly have power over impoverished locals. One of the leaders of this ring of power is Chappie’s father, an

American expatriate named Doc. Americans like Doc assert their authority over the locals due to their affluence and their sense of racial superiority. As a biological descendent of Doc, Chappie must decide whether he wants to continue his father’s errand, and grow up to be as ruthless and corrupt as this man, or align himself with the compassion that he has come to associate with his black father substitute. This situation parallels the similarly divided loyalties that emerged during the Cold War. As many were divided on the subject of “the color line” at home and its ramifications abroad, the nation’s mission to expand its family by “adopting” nonaligned nations came under question.

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By returning to the controversies over race in Cold War America, Banks highlights the interrelationship between domestic and foreign affairs. A blot on the US government in its initiatives in recently decolonized areas of the world such as Africa, the race question conflicts with the US’s errand of freedom and democracy for all.

Penny Von Eschen explains that “fabricating an image of American racial harmony, and of simultaneously not wanting to embarrass its white supremacist allies by pretending to believe in this fabrication” was of chief importance to US policymakers (120). Banks’ empathetic portrayal of I-Man allows readers to identify with a character that is ultimately crushed by a system of power that privileges whiteness. While the presentation of whiteness in Bone is rooted in the domestic issues surrounding racial inequality in the US, it also illustrates its effects on a global stage. For example, modern forms of US imperialism, particularly neocolonial activities such as tourism and the drug trade, highlight the negative impact US involvement can have on other nations. Contrary to the US rhetoric of familial love, this involvement does not always benefit the local population. By presenting the black rather than the white father as the role model,

Banks questions the authority that has long been associated with racial superiority.

Whiteness in his narrative is not a guarantee of sound decision-making; rather, it is a sign of corruption.

In order to confront the system of power associated with fatherhood, Bone must first learn what it feels like to be part of a racial minority. In Jamaica, Bone finds himself in a world where his whiteness makes him more visible; at the same time, his status as adolescent contributes to his continuing invisibility. Stuck in this in-between state, a product of his age, race, and legal status (Bone is an illegal alien during his stay in

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Jamaica), Bone searches for a way to transform himself into a “new beggar” so that he might make a home in Jamaica. Bone initially believes that such a transformation depends on his ability to physically blend in. Indeed, as he works on the ganja plantation with I-Man, Bone notes that his labors have physically changed him:

I was standing alone dribbling water from a pail onto the plants like I- Man’d showed me and I flipped my head to chase off a mosquito and saw dreadlocks swirling through the air in my shadow. Then I looked down at my arms and hands which were coffee-colored and when I saw I didn’t look like a regular white kid anymore I put down the bucket and did a little Rasta dance right there in the sunshine. (313)

Bone’s reaction to this physical transformation reveals his belief in the power of external changes to shape internal ones. In his interpretation of this passage, Jim O’Loughlin argues that Bone’s desire to physically transform himself is indicative of his current understanding of subjectivity: “Bone suggests that altering his appearance has begun to alter his subjectivity” (39). Such a belief is grounded in Bone’s belief that it is possible to

“transcend the limitations of his given subject position and construct an identity of his own, on his own terms” (39).

O’Loughlin’s argument about the role of whitenesss in Rule of the Bone neglects the fact that Bone’s age contributes significantly to his understanding of subjectivity. The fact that he is an adolescent, on the cusp of solidifying his subjectivity as a white male, plays a role in his belief that subjectivity is fluid, a belief, O’Loughlin points out, that is later revised based on Bone’s experiences on the island. Karen Sánchez-Eppler explains that children are frequently seen “not as selves, but as stages in the process of making an adult identity” (xvi). Children are taught to understand their own position as fluid, and to interpret their existence as one dominated by change. Bone accepts this notion of childhood, and believes that if he tries hard enough he can reform himself

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physically as well as spiritually. The limitation of Bone’s understanding of his subjectivity is that he fails to account for the fact that he cannot transform himself without the aid of an adult, I-Man, whose authority allows him to “pass” as black. If we return to the passage where Bone experiences his physical transformation, it is evident that it is prompted by I-Man in every respect: Bone’s skin tans because I-Man allows him to work in his ganja fields and he manages to grow dreadlocks because I-Man rubs a liquid concoction in his hair. Bone’s experience on the island will eventually lead him to reassess his previous beliefs about race and about the fluidity of one’s subjectivity; however, before he can do so, he must first accept his inclusion in the system of power that is predicated on whiteness.

Bone’s sense of a fluid subjectivity is first tested when he learns that his biological father, “Doc,” is living a few miles away from him. A rich white man who deals in hard drugs, Doc introduces Bone to a lifestyle that highlights racial difference. At the plantation where his father lives, there is a group of black men who Bone refers to as

“natties” or “Rent-a-Rastas” (the latter, a term he learns from I-Man) because they hang out with white women and are willing to have sex with them in order to share in the women’s upscale lifestyle. Bone admits that “No money actually changed hands,” but he believes that what the natties and white women are doing is wrong: “People who have to sell themselves ought to be paid in cash” (287). Despite his strong words, Bone initially overlooks the hierarchy on the plantation, because he is so taken with his biological father. In his very first encounter, Bone races after his father’s car, yelling like a small child, “Daddy! Daddy! Over here, it’s me, your son Chappie!” (271). Bone’s fascination with his biological father has a lot to do with his memories of his life with his

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mother and stepfather. Blaming his failed relationship with his mother on his stepfather, and harboring understandable feelings of rage as a result of his stepfather’s sexual abuse, Bone wonders if “things would’ve been different if I’d’ve had my real father to go to when I was seven and Ken first started in” (222). “With my real father to help me,”

Bone further reflects, “I wouldn’t have been scared to tell like I was with my mom who I couldn’t go to or didn’t think I could because Ken was her husband and she loved him supposedly and never let me complain about him” (222). As Bone separates from his mother and stepfather, he builds up a fantasy image of his biological father, believing that “things would’ve been different” if his father had been there to shelter him.

Bone’s belief in his father, along with his desire for his protection, initially enables him to ignore the treatment of the black men on the plantation. The plantation, owned and run by Doc’s girlfriend, Evening Star, is a site for wealthy elites from the U.S. who are interested in having a good time. Drugs swap hands as quickly as sexual partners, and food and liquor seem to appear from nowhere. While Bone sees Evening Star as the source of the sexual energy in the house, it is his father who underscores the system of ownership. Bone learns this lesson when he discovers Evening Star and I-

Man having sex: disturbed by this primal encounter, Bone runs to his “real” father, and confesses what he has witnessed. Bone’s need to confess is prompted by his feeling that he is not loved by his biological father and fear of abandonment: “I don’t know what

I’m pissed at. It’s everything I guess. The no birthday cake and I-Man banging Evening

Star and my father gone without even saying goodbye” (300). Bone hopes that confessing to his father will make him feel better and strengthen their bond; however, instead it results in his father’s decision to kill I-Man. The conversation between

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biological father and son shatters Bone’s ideal image of his white father, who at last transforms into his true monstrous shape:

Well, Bone, I’m going to have to kill him. Jeez. How come? Why? Because what’s mine is mine. That’s the rule I live by, Bone. And when some little nigger comes into my house and takes what’s mine, he has to pay. He has to pay and pay, many times over. And the only thing that nigger owns is his worthless life, so that’s what he’ll have to pay with. (302)

Doc reveals the extent of the racial divide at Starport, on the island more generally, and in the contemporary world system. His belief in ownership, and a system of exchange where bodies function as currency, is one with which Bone is already well familiar.

However, the conversation with his father forces Bone to confront the system of power in place in Starport and make a decision concerning his future.

These narrative developments return readers to questions of fatherhood that

Banks raises from the beginning of the novel. At the novel’s opening, Bone’s maternal grandmother declares, “You don’t have a father, Chappie. Forget him” (4). It seems at this point that his grandmother’s words are correct as all his fathers have failed him.

Drugs and hatred consume his biological father, whereas business and sexual pleasure preoccupy his black father substitute. While Bone tries to fit into his two fathers’ worlds, he cannot manage it. Such concerns about fatherhood and its ability to survive in the late-twentieth century is, in Claudia Nelson’s opinion, testament to the belief that

“fatherhood is something that doesn’t always come naturally, something that may require peculiar circumstances if it is to flourish” (99). Nelson gives the example of a

Merlin story, in which the wizard of legend is his own father, literally birthing himself.

Banks’ protagonist appears to follow a similar course. Like Merlin, Bone must also

“father himself” in the sense that he must first choose his own father and then make

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decisions that change his position from son to father. As in the garden scene, Bone must act quickly in order to survive and make decisions that betray both his fathers, at once rendering him the “bad” son and aligning him with the guilt and shame associated with white fatherhood.

Bone experiences this guilt and shame most strongly when he discovers I-Man’s corpse. The death of his father figure makes Bone realize that his attempts to protect his family and play father have failed. I-Man’s mutilated body, with “his skinny little legs sticking out and his eyes and mouth open” and a “jagged hole in the center of his forehead,” is a disturbing image of the potential violence of fatherhood (339-340). As critics of fatherhood have noted, the power of fathers remains a constant source of interest. Citing several examples where fathers either abuse their wives or children, or else abandon them completely, Claudia Nelson concludes that “clearly our culture feels considerable anxiety about fatherhood—an anxiety that long predates the supermarket self-help book and the network talk show” (98). Robert Griswold shares Nelson’s view, remarking that “Today, fatherhood has become politicized: its terms are contested, its significance fragmented, its meaning unstable” (9). These anxieties about fatherhood extend to metaphors related to the making and breaking of national ties. As I noted previously, Singley argues that the adoption trope served as a way to work through anxieties about the United States’ break from Great Britain. Colonial conquest has also been written about in terms of parent-child relations. A “good” father, or colonizer, is supposed to protect his weak and innocent children. Such rhetoric is dangerous because it legitimates forms of oppression; however, it remains instructive as it

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constitutes yet another way in which fatherhood is used to think through social ties, at once on an individual, national, and international scale.

Bone’s declaration upon seeing I-Man’s body that “Somehow the whole terrible thing felt like it was my fault and there was no way left to make it right now” serves as one of the many instances where Bone is used to comment on white guilt (340). This guilt is related not just to the slave trade, but also includes the neo-colonial practices of wealthier nations that are so powerfully on display in Banks’s novel. Bone’s need to narrate this history is rooted in the very origins of “nation,” and with the United States more specifically. In the landmark collection, Nation and Narration (1990), Homi Bhaba begins by claiming that “Nations, [are] like narratives. . . . [Nations] lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye.” It is through this process of narration that “the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west”

(1).

Bhaba’s identification of the nation as narration is instructive within the American context. Cold War scholars, including Lewis and Miller, traveled to distant countries in order to gain the perspective needed to narrate their version of “America,” an experience that Amy Kaplan captures nicely in her critique of Miller’s preface to the

Errand into the Wilderness:

[Miller’s travels to the Congo] did for his intellectual development what he claims the Puritan errand did for American history; it founded the “beginning of the beginning” that gives coherence to all that follows. From the remove of the vantage of the Congo Miller discovered himself at home with a coherent national identity; there, like the Puritans in the wilderness, he found himself “left alone with America.” (4)

Much like Miller before him, Bone travels to Jamaica in order to know “I-self,” to grasp his individual as well as a national identity—or, to use Bhaba’s words, to “narrate” his

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national self. This process of narration depends on notions of family, and in particular the social construct of fatherhood, since it is fatherhood that has often been employed to narrate the colonial projects of Western nations.

Bone’s desire to separate himself from this national history, a history that stares him in the face in I-Man’s postmortem gaze, leads him to conclude, “I was definitely not into fatherhood” (367). Bone’s refusal of fatherhood is linked to his experiences on the island,5 which solidify his suspicion of white fatherhood in all its past incarnations. The novel’s final scene is most telling in this regard as it provides a potential solution to the problems raised by Bone’s journey for self-understanding. Having completed his journey and realigned himself with his black father by betraying Doc, Bone feels that he now understands what it means to be part of a family, as both a father and a son. Watching the stars above him, Bone realizes that each constellation is like its own special family unit: “The biggest stars or at least the brightest ones were related like in a family and you could connect the dots so to speak and make a picture if you wanted” (388). Bone’s realization prompts him to search the sky for his family, an act that ultimately empowers him. Bone is now able to create rather than destroy in the final moment of his journey.

The shift suggests that perhaps he has at last escaped the system of power that he loathes. Yet even in this moment of triumph, Bone must also keep in mind his failures.

The constellations that he forms are of those who died because of him, including his recently deceased father figure.

5 One of the scenes that most explicitly references the Cold War intervention in the Caribbean occurs when I-Man explains how the locals reuse old tarps left from the US military invasion of Grenada in order to cover up their illegal ganja crops. According to I-Man, the tarps are “de bes’ t’ing ‘bout dat invasion so as t’ mek de ganja reach him fulfillment undisturbed ‘neath de Jamaican sun an’ den return to Babylon an’ help create de peaceable kingdom dere” (330). In this passage, I-Man recognizes the benefits of the U.S. invasion, yet his words still emphasize the fact that the U.S. was invading rather than helping the islanders. It is only by mere chance that the rubbage left behind comes to good use.

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The comfort of gazing up at those who served as positive influences in his life enables Bone to better understand his past and to come to terms with his origins. As he observes a constellation that represents I-Man, Bone is comforted by the fact that his father substitute will be watching and guiding him with the simple words, “Up to you,

Bone!”(390). Such an ending rejects traditional conceptions of childhood and empowers the adolescent protagonist. Yet such an empowerment comes at a cost: Bone is stripped of his family ties, and returns home like Herman Melville’s Ishmael, an orphan and survivor of tragic events. Having drifted out to sea after surveying the consequences of racial divisions and neo-colonialism, Bone returns to mainstream U.S. society. Even in the post-Cold War society of the 1990s, Banks suggests, crossing racial boundaries has its risks, and national belonging is still largely dictated by the color of one’s skin. Such a conclusion challenges Cold War rhetoric of familial love that proposes that one’s race does not define one’s ability to belong in the US family.

Native Fathers, Oriental Others, and American Discontent after September 11

In his most recent novel, Flight (2007), Sherman Alexie expands upon previous critiques of US policy, once more merging the domestic and the transnational. Focused primarily with policies that developed in response to the 9/11 attacks, Alexie returns to the figure of the father to question the decisions of US leaders. Rejecting the image of the father as an upright and infallible character, Alexie inverts the power relations that underwrite the errand into the wilderness myth. For Miller, fathers appear as strong, authoritarian figures that determine the future destiny of their progeny. The role of the son, in contrast, is to fulfill the mission set down by his father. A novel that revolves around the exploits of a troubled Native American adoptee, Flight rejects this model of father-son bonds. As I’ve already suggested, the father-son bond is often more

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complicated than Miller claims. Sons do not always admire their fathers, nor do they always follow the orders set down by their guardians. Moreover, the son’s doubts are not always unjustified; there are many cases where fathers fail to fulfill the role of the ideal father, thus creating scenarios where the son must make decisions about his life trajectory. In the Errand into the Wilderness, Miller suggests that it is the son’s inability to live up to his father’s high standards that creates a problem for the future of America; however, Alexie suggests that it is in fact the fathers that are at fault.

Flight is not the first novel where Alexie turns to the figure of the father in order to critique US actions. Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval points out that Alexie’s constant obsession with fatherhood enables the author to develop critiques of national leaders. In works such as his 1998 film Smoke Signals, Alexie creates fictional fathers whose actions parallel recent US presidents:

The similarities are there—Arnold, Victor’s biological father, acts like our “founding fathers” did and how current “fathers” do today. These “fathers” first deny that they have a problem. They make up stories or lies to cover up or rationalize their actions. Arnold performs magic tricks and makes jokes, believing he can charm people into overlooking his behavior. Former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush do the same thing today, smiling and laughing while making jokes about not finding “weapons of mass destruction.” Upon being confronted, these fathers then run away, leaving behind destroyed lives and communities. (129)7

The similarities extend beyond the desire to run away from or deny one’s problems.

Zits, the protagonist of Flight, is troubled because of his inability to find a replacement for his drunken father who abandoned him as a child. In Flight, much as in Smoke

7 Armbruster-Sandoval is not suggesting that Alexie’s intent was to critique former president George W. Bush. Rather, he is suggesting that the theme of fatherhood and forgiveness in Smoke Signals connects to larger issues surrounding the U.S.’s past actions towards Native Americans. Armbruster-Sandoval frames his discussions with questions raised by his former undergraduate students: “‘When Thomas asks, “how do we forgive our fathers,” is he talking about our biological fathers or he is talking about our founding fathers?’” It is by way of these questions that Armbruster-Sandoval makes a case for reading Smoke Signals in relation to former “fathers’” (i.e., presidents) actions.

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Signals, the narrative is not so much about reforming the father, as it is about the son’s ability to forgive and transcend his father’s limitations. This requires a confrontation with one’s history and cleaning of the proverbial attic. Much like Bone’s need to relinquish his fantasies about his biological father, Alexie’s protagonist must come to terms with his father’s inability to fulfill the role of a loving guardian.

The plight of Alexie’s protagonist is part of a series of post-9/11 fiction that underscores the importance of the past, and especially the importance of one’s father.

Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the

Pentagon, a surge of biographical sketches of the U.S.’s founding fathers emerged in what Ray Raphael names the “Founder Chic” historical movement. The goal of these historians is to make the founders seem extraordinary by emphasizing what made them ordinary.8 According to Raphael, the Founder Chic historian “produces a level of historical analysis that is frivolous at best” (131). He further claims, “Like modern celebrities, the founders have been humanized, personalized, and made accessible to the masses” (128). This process depends on the author’s ability to balance ordinariness with greatness. Even though “Founder Chic” historians fill their books with the mundane activities of their famous subjects, they also never let readers forget their greatness. For example, Gordon Wood, in Revolutionary Characters (2006), remarks that “despite all criticism and debunking of these founders, they seem to remain for most Americans, if not for most academic historians, an extraordinary elite, their achievements scarcely matched by those of any other generation in American history” (9). Wood’s comment

8 An example of this is when Joseph Ellis, in Founding Brothers (2000), devotes a long chapter to a dinner party hosted by Thomas Jefferson. By structuring his book around ordinary events like eating dinner, Ellis makes this celebrated national leader seem infinitely more human. The act of eating, drinking, and entertaining—activities familiar to us all—make Jefferson’s life seem a little less glamorous and a little more ordinary.

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attests to the continued potency of the figure of the father. No matter their flaws, these leaders appear as models of moral superiority.

The Founder Chic movement testifies to the desire to recover positive images of fathers in times of national tragedy. Although focused on the nation’s founders, these biographical sketches demonstrate how in times of crisis the traditional associations of fathers as strong, wise, and capable leaders return as sources of comfort. As the head of the traditional nuclear family, the father is the one who brings the respective members of his family together. He gives a sense of unity to the family, and he also makes the hard decisions that will determine the family’s future. It is for this reason that the father must forgo selfish desires; he is responsible for the success and safety of his family, and so his actions must take into account the interests of all.

This sketch of the father’s role, while outmoded by contemporary standards, remains integral to national ideology surrounding fatherhood. Since fathers occupy positions of leadership, it is imperative that they are subjected to standards that match their level of authority. In the case of the founding fathers, these men must make decisions that not only affect their individual families but the families of everyone in the nation; they are therefore subjected to standards that most fail to uphold. Even founders like Thomas Jefferson, perhaps one of the most famous of the founding fathers, had flaws that historians have uncovered over time; yet national myth demands that these flaws are covered over in times of crisis in order to preserve the image of a healthy thriving nation.

In Flight, Alexie chooses to recuperate the son rather than the father. Zits’s father is beyond saving, but Zits himself, a troubled teenager who recently shot several

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people, is not. Zits’s journey is one of redemption: in bearing witness to the crimes of the men who came before him, Zits can break a historical cycle of violence. Like the new “fathers” that Armbruster-Sandoval identifies in his analysis of Smoke Signals, Zits can either repeat his father’s mistakes or begin anew. Zits surpasses his father by learning from mistakes made in the past. He witnesses firsthand how those thrust into positions of authority can let anger drive their decisions, and in so doing hurt those least capable of defending themselves. As Alexie’s protagonist learns from these experiences he develops into a figure far stronger than the various fathers that populate the narrative. It is through this transformation of the lost, vengeful son that Alexie ultimately challenges the myth of the superiority of the father. Sons are capable of overcoming the damage done to them by negligent fathers, and even of surpassing them. By touting the son as the heroic figure, Alexie negates in the myth of the father’s unquestionable ability to lead and direct the course of his family. With the father figure’s association with national leaders, such a critique suggests that those currently in power in the US are similarly unqualified to lead.

Sins of the Father: Zits’s Flight Through Time

Even before opening the cover of Flight, readers are reminded of recent events that challenged the ability of US fathers to lead the nation. The novel’s title invariably conjure up images of Flights 11 and 175 crashing into the World Trade Center, a connection that is emphasized further by the book’s cover. The shooting target on the front, along with a darkened figure, presumably Zits, raising two guns in the air, hints at

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impending terrorism.9 The terrorist, described as an unknowable force of evil in post-

9/11 propaganda, became a pretext for racial exclusions from the national family.

President George W. Bush declared in an interview with CNN on September 17, 2001 that the Al Qaeda terrorists were an enemy unlike any the United States had ever faced before. Bush claimed that the terrorists were “a different kind of enemy…[one] that likes to hide…[and] slit the throats of women on airplanes in order to achieve an objective that is beyond comprehension.” The title and cover page thus work together to remind readers about this rhetoric regarding terrorism and the response of national leaders to this threat to national security.

In an effort to defeat “the enemy,” many residents in the U.S., even citizens, came under surveillance simply because of their skin color. Because they looked similar to a terrorist, or because they originated from the Middle East, their right to belong came into question. Flight underscores the injustice of these decisions. Through the adventures of his protagonist, Alexie suggests that the inability of non-white characters to fit into white society is the result of a much longer cycle of vengeance and pain. While

Alexie indicates that the pain of his non-white characters is partly due to their participation in this cycle, primarily through the commitment of acts of terrorism, he also suggests that national leaders, or “fathers,” are to blame. The decisions of past leaders, for example, led to the decimation of Native peoples, an act with long-term consequences. By expertly drawing upon Anglo-American associations with fatherhood,

Alexie launches a full-scale critique of these national leaders’ actions.

9 Readers might also associate the cover image to the Virginia Tech massacre, which took place a mere eighteen days after Flight’s publication, as well as other heavily publicized school shootings like Columbine.

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In order to achieve his goals, Alexie encourages his readers to identify with the son rather than the father. An orphan who finds it difficult to live with foster families, Zits is filled with anger directed toward his father. His mother died when he was six and his father abandoned him before he was born. His loss is compounded by the fact that he is left adrift in the social system for Indian orphans:

There’s a law called the Indian Child Welfare Act that’s supposed to protect half-breed orphans like me. I’m only supposed to be placed with Indian foster parents and families. But I’m not an official Indian. My Indian daddy gave me his looks, but he was never legally established as my father. (8-9)

The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was passed by Congress in 1978 “in response to the alarmingly high number of Indian children being removed from their homes by both public and private agencies” (“Indian Child Welfare Act”). The intent of the ICWA is to prevent children from being removed from their tribes so that they can maintain their cultural identity. However, because his father never claimed him, Zits is not covered by the law and he becomes an outcast from tribal culture. Zits similarly feels alienated from his mother’s Irish culture. He identifies primarily as Indian, although he loves and misses his mother more than his father. Zits’s identification with Indian culture has to do with his orphan status, as well as the fact that his physical appearance reminds him of his father. He feels he has no home, an experience common to Native peoples forced to live on reservations and that drives his own father to the streets.

Zits’s feeling of alienation takes on especially troubling ramifications in a post-

9/11 context. Svetlana Boym argues in The Future of Nostalgia (2001) that Americans possess a strong desire for roots: “Americans are supposed to be antihistorical yet the souvenirization of the past and the obsession with roots and identity here are ubiquitous” (38). Boym refers to the American tendency to shore up what little history is

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available, or, in the words of Richard Hofstadter to “make remarkably intense demands upon their history” (The American Political Tradition 4). The need to collect and preserve history, a need driven by the search for roots, returns with a fierce passion in the aftermath of September 11. Books memorializing the Twin Towers began pouring out of publishing houses before the year was even over. Museum curators began collecting debris, biological material, and anything once owned by victims of the attacks.

Clothes, shoes, backpacks, steel girders, cell phones—nothing was considered too mundane for these collections. Oral history archives were also established, so that the families of victims could record their experiences, and these collections also collected the messages left by victims in their final moments. The desire to remember a contemporary historical tragedy thus launched an enormous effort to preserve history and to prepare for future generations.

Such a move is not surprising considering the patriotic fervor that struck many in the nation in the aftermath of the attacks. However, these acts of national remembering excluded others based on racial difference. In her study of the effects of post-9/11 rhetoric on Muslim American youth, Sunaina Maira explains that young Muslim children faced harsh racism from other Americans. In one of Maira’s interviews, a teenage girl named “Sara”10 reflects on the racially charged environment of post-9/11 America:

I wish that thing did not happen on September 11, and I wish they [the terrorists] did not kill those people in the buildings. But I wish America did not send the bombs over there, to Afghanistan. My father told me that I should not say these things outside, because people think that the Muslims had something to do with that thing on September 11. What did we do? I don’t understand. (3)

Other children in Maira’s study make similar remarks, attesting to the difficulties of being

10 In order to protect the privacy of her interview subjects, Maira uses pseudonyms.

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racially different at this moment in American history. Maira considers the importance that family bonds play for these children, who are often “sponsored” by US families as they attempt to gain citizenship. Although she does not extensively address the part national leaders play in the problems that plague Muslim American youth, Maira does at least hint at the long-term impact of decisions made by these “fathers.” She writes, “the post-9/11 moment is not exceptional, but part of a longer history of U.S. imperialism and political repression that has generally been evaded or erased” (6). In Alexie’s novel, political (and cultural) repression is similarly directly related to the decisions made by fathers. While Alexie does not include any political leaders in Flight, he does invite his readers to think about the connections between the fictional male characters and those responsible for U.S. history.

The conflict between fathers and their sons, while a recurrent theme in the novel, is linked to the tragedy of 9/11 in an early scene that involves Zits and one of his foster fathers. As Zits attempts to confront the many emotions that define the father-son bond, he makes an association between failed bonds and plane crashes. Zits begins by first elaborating on his foster parent situation, declaring that his Indian foster fathers “were bigger jerks than any of my eighteen white foster fathers” (9). He goes on to tell a story about one of these foster fathers, Edgar, who was so upset when Zits beat him at a remote control airplane contest that he crashed both his and Zits’s planes:

Yes, Edgar had forgotten we switched planes. But I suppose it didn’t matter because he flew the other plane into a tree, too. Crash. He didn’t yell or cuss or get all crazy. Edgar calmly destroyed six hundred dollars’ worth of model airplane. Crash, crash.

The repetition of the word “crash” in Zits’s narration of this event recalls the planes

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crashing into the two World Trade Center towers. Although Zits focuses on the economic loss, the readers recognize that it is not the planes that really matter. Zits’s recollection of the event, of handling the broken wings, bent rudders, and the missing head of the miniature pilot confirm the emotional and psychological damage done in this moment (10). Like the little plastic pilot in the plane, Zits has “lost his head” due to a lifetime of emotional wounds at the hands of father figures. He recounts numerous stories where his foster fathers abuse him emotionally and physically, as well as the moment when he snaps and resists his fathers’ abuse of their power: “When I was nine,

I poured lighter fluid on my aunt’s boyfriend and tried to set him on fire” (161). While Zits fails to murder this father figure, his desire to burn his father figure’s body symbolizes his pent up rage and returns readers to the trope of the burning home, one that Alexie uses in earlier work such as Smoke Signals (1998) in order to signal discontent with the

American family.11

The wounding of the Indian child is a common trope in Native American literature. In Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995), for example, the female protagonist,

Angel Wing, is physically scarred when her psychologically disturbed mother bites her face, ripping flesh away with her teeth, and burns her skin. Hogan locates the origins of this violent act in the mother’s own experience with white male colonizers, who tortured and raped her as a child. Hogan attempts to find ways for Angel to work through this grief by reconnecting with her culture and tribal lands. Such work is made difficult because these lands continue to be desecrated by whites who view it only in terms of

11 Other instances of burning homes that immediately come to mind are Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) and William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” (1939). Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval also connects the burning of the house to the burning rage inside Native people. He remarks that the “firewater” that Arnold drinks is a way of dealing with “centuries of conquest, colonization, genocide,” but that it never completely removes the pain that derives from this traumatic past (132).

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money. Land is destroyed in Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves (2008) to make way for cheap housing; and Hogan’s Solar Storms is about the literal burial of tribal lands as a dam is built and flood Native communities. In addition to these forms of abuse, children in other novels by Native writers, such as Lesley Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes

(1999), recount the brutal treatment of children captured and torn from their families in order to teach them the ways of mainstream American culture. Indigo, the main character in Silko’s novel, experiences first hand this abuse, as she is beaten for speaking her language and forced to wear an uncomfortable uniform.

Alexie similarly weaves these issues into his father-son narrative. He traces Zits’s emotional development while also placing these larger cultural problems into relief. Like the cycles of violence that Zits experiences, the pain induced by failed father-son bonds haunts the narrative. Readers are first made aware of this as Zits magically enters the body of a white FBI agent who assassinates Native Americans protesting the destruction of their lands. Zits must watch as the agent’s partner shoots a young Indian man. He must then shoot the dead body when his partner threatens to kill him if he doesn’t start acting normal. The ordeal is too much for Zits and he passes out only to find himself surrounded by the man’s family upon reviving. As Zits watches the man’s wife and children, he thinks, “Hank makes the world safe. He is a good and loving husband and father. He is one hundred different versions of himself, and only one of them is a killer” (58).

Zits then leaves the man’s body and enters a new body, that of a small Native

American boy who is unable to speak because of a wound inflicted by a U.S. soldier.

Zits is thrilled to be in this new body, since he at last has a strong and loving Indian

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father. But the image of his new father is troubled when he is asked to cut the throat of a teenage soldier captured during the Little Big Horn battle. Zits notices that his new father has “little hands war-painted on his chest,” and wonders if they are “to remember the Indian children who have been destroyed by white soldiers” (76). Zits knows that this child is much like himself in that he is wounded and hurt, unable to speak out against his oppressors. Yet he also feels empathy for the white soldier, who he views as also “only a child” (78).

Alexie uses Zits’s first two transformations to critique the violence associated with imperialism. Like his own destructive father-son bonds, Zits witnesses the consequences of failed ties between two nations competing for the same land. Such competition influenced the meaning of childhood during the colonial period. According to

Duane, notions of childhood were frequently “stretched in ways that changed the meaning of childhood itself” (Suffering Childhood 11). Duane argues that childhood was used as a metaphor for the changes associated with the violent process of nation- making, so that the vulnerable, suffering child came to represent both the “infant nation” and its colonized subjects (13). In his comprehensive study of the relations between the

U.S. government and Native American tribes, Francis Paul Prucha contends that the relationship between these competing nations, like many other colonial relationships, was rooted in paternalism. The U.S. government treated grown Indian men and women like children, so much so that the indigenous people commonly referred to the President as the “Great Father.” “The Great Father rhetoric,” writes Prucha, “largely disappeared after 1880, but paternalism continued and sometimes increased” (x). Although Alexie does not ruminate at length on the Great Father rhetoric, this narrative, like the Indian

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motif more generally, is addressed obliquely (Salaita 34). Fathers like Hank Storm and the unnamed Indian warrior from the Battle of Little Big Horn compete to gain the power and authority associated with fatherhood. Such power depends on their willingness to assert their authority over children. Destroying children’s bodies is integral to the cycles of violence that Alexie identifies.

Alexie extends the family metaphor through a portrayal of fraternal rather than paternal love, a shift that plays upon the charged meanings of both relationships after the September 11, 2001 attacks. When Zits enters the body of a white flight instructor named Jimmy, he learns that Jimmy is haunted by visions of his dead friend, Abbad, an

Ethiopian immigrant who dies while committing an act of terrorism. Jimmy’s narrative dwells on the betrayal of his “brother,” who he took in when no other flight instructor would work with him. Jimmy continually repeats the phrase, “Oh, Abbad, you are a murderer. Oh, Abbad, you are a betrayer” (127), a lament that is both touching and disturbing. The phrase signals Jimmy’s affection for his lost friend; however, its repetition becomes chant-like, giving it religious undertones that some might associate with Muslim prayer. Such words recall the stereotypical nature of Abbad and other similar Muslim characters in Alexie’s fiction. Steven Salaita argues that in this way

“Alexie reinforces the sanctification of American suffering at the hands of Muslim terrorists, but he simultaneously endeavors to undermine the causal fusion of Islam and terrorism” (34). The combination of events such as Abbad’s act of terrorism, which vindicate U.S. citizens’ fears about the Muslim other, combined with his character’s

“clichéd attitudes” appear to undermine Alexie’s efforts to achieve this goal; however, he always combines the actions and behavior of his Muslim characters with instances of

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anti-Muslim racism, so that the guilt associated with acts of vengeance are equally distributed.

Alexie’s distribution of guilt and his inclusion of ethical questions in the Jimmy and Abbad passages depend on the fraternal metaphor. The usefulness of the fraternal metaphor, as David Waldstreicher attests in his review of Ellis’s Founding Brothers, is that it connotes “commonality, rivalry, reconciliation” (198). Jimmy, while treating Abbad like a younger brother, cannot openly claim Abbad because of his betrayal. He refers to

Abbad as his “best friend,” while Abbad replies, “You are my brother” (130). Jimmy commits many brotherly acts, reassuring Abbad when he is scared and celebrating his triumphs. Even his grief over Abbad’s betrayal is that an older brother might feel. Jimmy feels responsibility for Abbad and his actions, and it is this feeling of responsibility, of brotherhood, that drives his pain. However, Jimmy’s ability to accept Abbad as brother is limited by his perception of his friend as an absolute other. Abbad is referred to as

Jimmy’s “brown friend,” and his presence in Jimmy’s memory is antagonistic. Abbad’s rivalry with Jimmy is rooted in their perceived differences. Abbad, for example, lectures

Jimmy on masculinity, declaring that Muslim men don’t let their women control them; however, a few minutes later he sheepishly admits that he is in trouble for forgetting to purchase a bottle of milk (114). Moments such as these occur frequently, so that readers can never trust the apparent differences between the two characters. Indeed, the fraternal metaphor encourages readers to not forget that Jimmy and Abbad have a commonality that overrides any conflict between them.

Alexie’s approach to the brotherly bond of Jimmy and Abbad is an example of what Steven Salaita calls “liberal Orientalism,” by which he means “a representation of

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Islam and the East more broadly rooted in the liberal principles of American multiculturalism” (22). Salaita explains how this orientation applies to Alexie’s post-9/11 literature, and to Flight more specifically:

[Alexie’s] post-9/11 fiction renders Natives customary to American national identity by evoking the specter of Islamic terrorism as a standard marker of inalterable difference. Alexie complicates this simplistic formula by retaining a type of Indigenous autonomy through nominal comparison of Indians with brown-skinned Muslims, but those comparisons never allow Muslims into the same philosophical or national polity, and so he ultimately leaves that formula fundamentally intact. (37)

Salaita’s recognition of Abbad, the Muslim other’s, inability to enter the national family is consistent with Alexie’s portrayal of family throughout Flight. As I mentioned previously, the scene with Jimmy and Abbad is unique not only because it is the only one that does not deal with white-Indian relationships, but also because it replaces the paternal metaphor with a fraternal one. These changes mark it as unique, so that readers will inevitably compare Abbad to the Indian characters in other sections. It is this comparison that touches on the liberal Orientalism that Salaita identifies in the novel.

The Indian characters, while persecuted, are still part of the national family, even if they are presented as a disowned or orphaned child like Zits. However, Abbad’s position as family member is always tenuous. He is “like a brother,” yet this relationship is deemed dangerous because Abbad is so volatile. While some rivalry is normal in a fraternal relationship, Abbad’s penchant for destruction is presented as confusing and irrational.

Jimmy, for example, notes that Abbad has lived in the United States for fifteen years, a fact that he brings up presumably because it should prove that Abbad has had time to become a part of the American family. However, Abbad retorts that he is only in the

United States because his home has been destroyed (121).

The scene with Abbad and Jimmy is important because it supplies readers with a

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point of comparison for the many scenes of family rivalry that fill the pages of Flight. It appears in the narrative right before Zits’s final transformation, when he enters the body of his Indian father. Once in his father’s body, Zits is able to discover the source of his inner pain, and to recognize its parallels with his father’s troubles. It is when Zits forces his father to “remember” why he left that Zits comes to this realization, seeing in his father’s childhood the same patterns of father-son abuse. Zits’s father’s father stands over his son and forces him to repeat over and over again the phrase “I ain’t worth shit”

(155). Zits’s father’s words recall a previous scene where Zits jokes that the Indian tribe at the Battle of Little Big Horn smells “like the Devil dropped a shit right here in the middle of this camp” (61). These repeated references to shit pick up on a motif that is woven throughout the narrative. Indians not only smell like shit, they are treated like it as well.

Alexie’s final evaluation of the hybrid nature of Zits is tragic. The story of this orphan ends with the promise of adoption; however, this adoption is contingent on Zits’s willingness to assimilate his white family’s values. His new mother enters the bathroom in the final scene and hands Zits some acne medicine, teaching him how to wash his face so that it will finally be clean. Such an act indicates that there is something unclean about Zits, and that he must wash himself in order to be reborn. This reading is confirmed by Zits’s final words, “Please, call me Michael” (181). By abandoning his chosen name, he demonstrates that he accepts his position in white culture. The ending is thus one of loss since Zits must discard his Indian identity in order to gain his new family’s acceptance. While such themes of loss and identity are present in Alexie’s earlier work such as The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and The

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Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), the message here is altered by the novel’s persistent engagement with questions raised by the September 11th attacks, in particular the price for integration into the national family.

As I will show in my final chapter, recent changes in the U.S.’s position in the global economy require a vision of U.S. national identity more flexible than ever before.

Multicultural children such as Zits no longer suffice in a world that depends on the U.S.’s willingness to become part of a global community; instead, the search for a truly “global” child citizen has begun. By examining the effects of globalization on childhood, it becomes possible to glimpse the future of “America.”

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CHAPTER 6 THE FUTURE OF “AMERICA”: CHILDHOOD, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE NEW US IDENTITY

In 1989, the United Nations passed the Convention on the Rights of the Child

(CRC), thus setting a precedent for children’s rights. The document contained 54 articles, including one guaranteeing the child’s right “to rest and leisure, [and] to engage in play.” While the CRC represented the UN’s attempt to expand international humanitarian efforts, especially in relation to child labor, the CRC also renewed conversations about the meaning of childhood. What does it mean to be a child in a global era, and how might we begin to define childhood in a way that respects both local and global experiences? While these questions are ones that all nations will need to address in the coming years, they are of particular relevance to twenty-first century

America. As Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Goankar argue in their study of global approaches to American studies, the end of the twentieth century signaled the close of an era defined by “the myth of an American Century and the mythology of

American exceptionalism” (1). If Edwards and Gaonkar’s prediction is correct, then this means that future definitions of “America” will need to depart from previous notions of

U.S. identity that are grounded in the belief in U.S. exceptionalism. By crafting a form of

U.S. identity that is not dependent on the myths of the twentieth century, and that in turn positions the U.S. as a part of a global community, it is possible to redefine the meaning of “America” and develop a new U.S. identity that is more fluid in nature. That is, it is possible to move away from a national and towards a global form of U.S. identity.

In order to make the transition from a national to a global form, it is necessary to once again refer to childhood. Courtney Weikle-Mills argues in her study of imaginary citizenship in the United States that this relationship was founded on the principle that

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the child could resolve many of the contradictions and limitations of U.S. citizenship.

“The notion of a child citizen,” Weikle-Mills contends, “was so powerful in structuring citizenship for all individuals because childhood offered a way to explain and balance citizenship’s limits and potentials as a political model meant to produce freedom” (7).

Weikle-Mill’s identifies the figure of the child’s remarkable ability to adapt to the needs of the nation’s citizens. Because children are not yet full citizens, they are able to represent an in-between state that has proved integral to definitions of citizenship in the past, and that continue to serve in this capacity in the present. Paula Fass points out in

Children of a New World (2007) that the U.S. participates in a larger trend where life is affected by modern globalization, and where globalization in turn challenges prior

“commitments to a certain kind of childhood” and necessitates a rethinking of these commitments (200). Fass’s observation indicates that childhood can and should change in response to globalization, a position supported by fellow social historian Peter Stearn.

Stearn notes that many scholars believe that globalization will influence childhood around the world, and that “changes in childhood, in turn, will affect and at least help define the nature of global citizenship” (845).1

The figure of the child, as Fass and Stearn’s arguments indicate, is already central to the conversation regarding global forms of citizenship, and will continue to be an integral part of this conversation so long as we associate children with fluid forms of identity. Yet despite the scholarly consensus regarding the importance of childhood in the development of a global definition of citizenship, there is still a good deal of contention about the ways globalization effects national identity. David Rosen is one of

1 Stearn’s remarks appear in the preface to a special edition of the Journal of Social History on the subject of globalization and childhood.

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many to address international laws regarding child labor.3 Rosen indicates that new laws protecting children are part of a “politics of age,” which he defines as “the use of age categories by different international, regional, and local actors to advance particular political and ideological positions” (296). Children, Rosen contends, are at the center of international humanitarian efforts in large part because they provide a way for policing others. By drawing upon Western conceptions of the child as innocent and vulnerable, it is possible to institute laws that urge others to adopt this position. Fass adds that children are not only passive subjects in a global system but also active participants in its development: children move and are moved as a result of globalization. They might be sent by their parents to live with relatives in another country in order to gain citizenship, but they may also initiate global migration in an effort to better their chances of success in the future (234). Fass’s observations indicate that new migration patterns may also challenge traditional notions of national identity, as children move between cultures and learn what it means to belong in more than one place.

All of these discussions highlight the ways childhood has emerged as an important point of debate for those invested in constructing global forms of citizenship.

What I offer in this chapter is a brief engagement with some of the issues surrounding globalization and childhood. If, as I argue in my former chapters, the child was integral to the articulation of national identity during the U.S.’s rise to global power, then what happens to this child now that this power is dwindling? How will U.S. citizens define childhood now that the U.S. is no longer a leader of the global community? In order to

3 See, for example, Elias Dinopoulos and Laixun Zhao’s “Child Labor and Globalization” (2007), Mary Ann Mason’s “The U.S. and the International Children’s Rights Crusade: Leader or Laggard?” (2005), Wolf Schäfer’s “The Uneven Globality of Children” (2005), and Michael Grossberg’s “Liberation and Caretaking: Fighting over Children’s Rights in Postwar America” (2012).

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better theorize the movement from a national to a global form of U.S. identity, I refer to a process that has been identified as “globalizing:” a process whereby one casts off national modes of inquiry in favor of global ones. I then turn my attention to the transnational flow of ideas and material goods between the United States and Taiwan.

As one of the U.S.’s most successful “experiments” in democracy, Taiwan is not only a rich source for studies of globalization, but also provides a logical conclusion to my study of the effects of U.S. international interventions in the Cold War period. Finally, through a case study of Chang Ta-Chun’s novel Wild Child [Ye haizi] (1996), I explore the ways that globalization impacts childhood and national identity, and specifically the way in which the child serves as a symbol of the promise of a globalized world. The child may not be able to fulfill these promises, but can at the very least guide efforts to imagine what such a future might look like.

The Child of Many Nations, or the Child of No Nation: National Identity in a Global Era

In order to better understand how childhood operates within a global framework, and why this construct is so central to the future of “America,” it is necessary to review the child’s relationship to national forms of identity. Christopher (Kit) Kelen and Björn

Sundmark remind us that childhood is embedded in the meaning of “nation,” and it is for this reason that the child often becomes a representative of national identity (1). In their introduction to The Nation in Children’s Literature (2013), Kelen and Sundmark note,

The idea of childhood pervades the rhetoric of nation and citizenship. Etymologically, “nation” refers us to the idea of “being born” and thereby localizes and connects a prime term in identity to the personal origin of those individual subjects for whom the nation (their nation) is home. (1)

Not only are children targeted by national rhetoric in an effort to secure the future of the nation, but the imagined child is also a symbol of the future promised by the nation’s

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youngest citizens. For example, during the Nationalist occupation of Taiwan, children were forced to perform flag raising ceremonies to honor their government. The raising of the flag was imagined to aid in the development of young Taiwanese citizens. There are many other examples that would similarly support the view that nation and childhood are interrelated. For my purposes here, I am concerned primarily with the shift from these more traditional expressions of nationalism to other less visible activities that stretch the meaning of citizenship. These activities are changing the definitions of citizenship, so that the global might now be included in it. As the primary symbol of the nation, the child is bound up in these changes. The child, as the in-between citizen, is both a child of many and of no nation.

The child’s in-between status is due to the fact that children are perceived as being flexible. Beliefs about children as either “impressionable” or “malleable” derive from Romantic notions of childhood, in particular Jean Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the tabula rasa, or “blank slate.” The tabula rasa implies that a child is an empty surface, able to be “filled up” with ideas provided by their elders. Because they are imagined as empty, children are primed to be indoctrinated into national ideology.

However, while their growth into future citizens seems inevitable, it is in fact a risky business. In order to secure the future of the nation, it is necessary to instill within the child a sense of national belonging. Children who participate in the activities of national ceremonies are being prepared for their future role as citizens. Children may begin modeling active forms of citizenship at an early age, and, because of their fluid status, are often quite successful in their endeavors. These children not only serve as figures of an individual nation’s future, they also serve as symbols of the collective fate of the

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nations of the world. The child who acts as an ambassador is capable of “belonging” to multiple nations, a role that makes children valuable members of individual nations and emerging models of global citizenship.

The participation of children in nation-building activities demonstrates precisely how children model an active form of national as well as global citizenship. In her study of the Camp Fire Girls, a precursor to the Girl Scouts of America, Jennifer Helgren explains how girls were encouraged to participate in community service in order to expand their notions of family. By committing themselves to their local community, girls would feel a sense of belonging that extended beyond their immediate family. This idea of family as a series of broadening circles—biological family, local community, and eventually nation—was important in the Cold War context, a moment marked, Helgren contends, by the U.S.’s “commitment to global citizenship” (305). In order to be in line with this global agenda, organizations like Camp Fire Girls created programs and activities that encouraged children to think about themselves as global as well as national citizens. Helgren provides examples where girls sent care packages to nations recovering from some catastrophe and participated in international awareness days, and one might also consider other similar efforts to transform children into world citizens. Ann Kordas explains how girl gymnasts not only acted as representatives of their respective nations—Olga Korbut for the Soviet Union and Mary Lou Retton for the

U.S.—but also how, in some cases, girls’ national affiliation was “switched” through their presentation in the media. Kordas uses as her example the case of Korbut, whose love of American culture made it easy to present the bubbly gymnast as an “all-American girl.”

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In contrast to traditional modes of citizenship, the Camp Fire Girls and Olympic gymnasts described here model a form of world citizenship: they are, in a very real sense, children of many nations. Anita Harris argues in her study, Future Girl (2004), that children who engage in activities that promote world citizenship are viewed as

“ambassadresses”: girls who represent both their home country and the potential to move beyond the divisions created by national identity (79-80). Boys too can play the role of child as ambassador. For example, Iqbal Masih, a child laborer in Pakistan’s rug industry, served as the poster child for humanitarian efforts to eliminate child labor.

Masih condemned the harsh conditions of the rug factories in Pakistan before being killed in a tragic car accident while visiting his home country. According to Lisa Hermine

Makman, Masih’s life and tragic death “highlights both children’s powerlessness (they are passive objects, exploited by adults) and their extraordinary power (they are powerful subjects, who can accomplish things that adults cannot achieve)” (294). Both

Masih’s efforts and his adoption as the poster child for humanitarian interventions indicate some of the ways that children can defy national forms of identity and embrace world citizenship.

While these examples underscore the way that children serve as emblems of world citizenship, they do not provide a model for theorizing a global form of identity or how the child might fit into this model. One remedy for this this methodological gap can be found in the concept of “globalizing,” as developed by Edwards and Gaonkar.

Edwards and Gaonkar maintain that in order to realize a global methodology we need to let go of the obsolete myth of the “American Century”:

The key to this strategy is to think of America as a collective agent abroad, collective but not unified by the ideology of exceptionalism. Rather, it is

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fragmented by the materiality of the capitalist project to which America has become committed, perhaps unbeknown to its own (imagined) soul. This is America global. America global becomes global only by diluting the vernacular, and by substituting “America” for the global. Whether that substitution can be reduced to things such as an “empire without colonies,” or a hegemonic imperium, might be secondary to figure out how to read the archives of America abroad. What is the American trace abroad, and how does that trace return to haunt the American vernacular? (17)

While Edwards and Goankar do not consider the child’s role in globalization, their observations about America’s participation in a global system remain useful. In order to achieve a global methodology, it is indeed necessary to study the “American trace abroad,” paying close attention to flows across borders. Additionally, in order to assess

“America global,” or the “future of ‘America,’” one must be attentive to the relationship between the myth of American exceptionalism and older notions of national identity.

Despite Edwards and Goankar’s compelling argument for such a methodological shift, this is no easy task, and there continue to be many efforts to reframe US studies within a global context. The contributors to Edwards and Gaonkar’s collection employ diverse approaches in order to insert “America” within a global framework. Brent Hayes

Edwards persuasively recasts Ralph Ellison as an internationalist, demonstrating that it isn’t necessary to turn our gaze abroad to develop a global perspective. Brian Larkin and Elizabeth Thompson trace the effects American commodities have had on cultures elsewhere in the world. Naoki Sakai examines the intersections between Japanese and

American colonialism, while Claudio Lomnitz deconstructs traditional notions of America by exploring the interactions with the culture of bordering nations like Mexico.

My contribution to these efforts consists of building upon current understandings of the relationship between globalization and childhood and theorizing how this relationship may produce a new US identity that can be identified as “global.” I argue

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that the child’s participation in the global flows that Edwards and Goankar identify as central to US studies as well as the centrality of childhood in conceptions of US national identity make childhood one of the best sites from which to imagine the future of

“America.” For the remainder of this chapter, I demonstrate the ways the child serves as a marker of the global flow of ideas, money, media, and technology—the different

“scapes” that Arjun Appadurai identifies in his landmark study of globalization (33)—and consider how the child’s participation in this system provides a way to study “America” from within a global framework.

Globalizing the American Child: A Case Study of Chang Ta-Chun’s “Wild Child”

In order to do so, I have selected as my case study a children’s novel by one of

Taiwan’s most popular writers, Chang Ta-Chun. If as Edwards and Goankar suggest, it is necessary to cast off the grip of the myths that predominated during the twentieth century, then it behooves scholars interested in developing a global methodology to study texts shaped by the Cold War. While published after the end of the Cold War,

Chang’s Wild Child (1996) bears the imprints of these struggles. Written during the transition from a military dictatorship to a democracy, Wild Child depicts the consequences of Taiwan’s Cold War policies, especially its long-term relationship with the United States. Chang locates the child within the political, cultural, and economic exchanges between the US and Taiwan, and identifies this figure as the one best able to represent Taiwan’s shifting national identity.

While Chang’s concern with Taiwan’s Cold War history may seem inconsequential to the future of “America,” this island nation was central to US Cold War

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politics.4 In order to challenge Communist China and prevent other Asian nations from

“falling like dominoes,” the U.S. government invested large sums of money in Taiwan’s economy.5 According to Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, between 1950 to 1965, “the United

States provided an annual average of some $100 million to Taiwan in nonmilitary assistance. This amount exceeded the per capita contribution made to any other government in the world during the same period” (54). Taiwan received an additional

$2.4 billion in U.S. military aid during these years, “the most of any Asian country” (Roy

141). The aid provided by the U.S. helped spur the rapid modernization of Taiwan and eventually led to its status as a major player in the world market. Moreover, with the help of the U.S., Taiwan received world recognition as the true government of China, and even held a spot in the United Nations until President Nixon decided to reestablish relations with the mainland government.6 With Nixon’s abandonment of what was

4 While in effect Taiwan is its own nation, it is still technically a province of China. Given back to China after the end of the Second Sino-Japan War, Taiwan and China currently run on a “one China, different interpretations” policy, which means that Taiwan is free to govern itself independently but must still remain part of China. Even though the Taiwan government and its people have considered independence, this position is controversial (and even dangerous) since China is still determined to keep Taiwan. A good explanation for China’s position is that it sees Taiwan as the last of the provinces lost due to imperialism, and it wants to reunite all of China once again. While this may be viewed as political propaganda, Melissa Brown, in Is Taiwan Chinese? (2004), argues that many Chinese on the mainland firmly agree with the government’s position regarding Taiwan (3-5).

5 Throughout this section I will use the word “Taiwan” in place of “Taiwanese.” As Xiaobing Tang argues in Writing Taiwan (2007), Taiwan’s history of migration and its varied ethnic groups (the largest of which are Han and Hakka), means that there is no real “Taiwanese” identity (51), unless, of course, one is referring to the many aborigine groups that still live in Taiwan (e.g., the Yami on Orchid Island). In order to understand Tang’s position, one must recall that Taiwan was colonized by Japan from 1895-1945, after which it was returned to China. Shortly thereafter, the Nationalist Party (led by Chiang Kai-Shek) took over the island, and there was a sharp division between those who had migrated from China in previous years and the new “Mainlanders.” With the lifting of military rule in the 1990s and the start of a true democracy, some of these ethnic tensions are lifting, and it is possible that a sense of Taiwanese identity will develop in the coming years. For more on Taiwan identity, see Melissa Brown’s Is Taiwan Chinese? (2004) and Leo Ching’s Becoming “Japanese” (2001). 6 During the Cold War, Taiwan’s government was referred to as the “Republic of China,” whereas mainland China was referred to as the “People’s Republic of China.”

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known as the U.S.’s “two Chinas policy,”7 Taiwan lost international recognition as a sovereign nation. While the U.S. continued to support Taiwan militarily and honored policies such as the Taiwan Relations Act,8 it could no longer recognize Taiwan as the legitimate government of China. The U.S.’s change in foreign policy led to the removal of Taiwan from the UN and the loss of nearly all of Taiwan’s international allies, since even those seeking aid from the now wealthy nation were unwilling to cross Beijing (Roy

137).

The U.S.’s investments in Taiwan during the Cold War established a long-term relationship that resulted in political, economic, and cultural exchanges. In her study of

U.S.-Taiwan relations, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker describes some of the cultural exchanges that occurred in this period. She notes that Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife,

“Madame” Chiang, were often featured on the cover of Time and Life magazine, a result of magazine owner Henry Luce’s investment in China following his mission work in the area (11). In 1937, the Chiangs were featured as man and wife of the year on the magazine’s cover. The Chiangs also made several trips to the U.S. in order to promote a positive image of their nation. During an extended stay in the early 1940s, Madame

Chiang ended her visit with a spectacular Hollywood event:

On an expanded stage in front of the repainted shell in the [Hollywood] Bowl, Spencer Tracy introduced a parade of eighteen leading film stars, including Ingrid Bergman, Ginger Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis,

7 The “two Chinas policy” was the U.S.’s attempt to appease the governments in Beijing and Taipei. By recognizing “two Chinas,” the U.S. was able to treat both governments as “official” rulers of China. This attempt at diplomacy ultimately failed, however, as neither Beijing nor Taipei was willing to accept the others right to rule.

8 The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 was established in order to soften the U.S.’s decision to switch alliances and support Beijing as the legitimate government of China. The hope was that the Act would show Taipei that the U.S.’s decision to establish diplomatic ties with Beijing did not mean the end of U.S. support for Taiwan.

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Barbara Stanwyck, and Shirley Temple; these were followed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and “several bands” playing a Chinese military marching song to detachments of American marines, infantry, sailors, and cadets from the Army Air Corps. As the servicemen presented arms, Mme Chiang was driven in an open Rolls-Royce sedan to a place of honor in front of the stage and presented with a bouquet of roses by Mary Pickford. (Spence)

Madame Chiang’s visit was the beginning of a long-term cultural exchange. The U.S. was one of the leading importers of Taiwan’s goods, and the U.S. reciprocated with its share of weapons and other goods desired by Taiwan. Additionally, the U.S. became for

Taiwan youth the preferred site for higher education. Many never returned, and those who did often achieved high-level government positions as a result of efforts to appease the U.S. government and demonstrate Taiwan’s commitment to a “free” China. As we shall see, the impact of these exchanges are evident throughout Chang’s Wild Child.

Sung-sheng (Yvonne) Chang attests that views of Taiwan as the “other China” or

“surrogate China” inevitably lead to comparisons of China to Taiwan (18-19), and that

“even if the aspired-to status of national literature were established for Taiwan literature, it still cannot be comprehended as an isolated phenomenon, without being situated in larger geopolitical referential frames” (21). “Whether we consciously acknowledge it or not,” Chang concludes, “there is an inevitable political subtext to all efforts at representing Taiwan today” (17). Other experts similarly testify to the political nature of

Taiwanese literature. For example, Fangming Chen stresses the importance of

Taiwan’s long period of martial law, when “the authoritarian rule, shaped by a single- value system, had previously demanded that literary workers bow to the ideological mold of institutional conformity” (26). The lifting of martial law in the 1990s, largely through the efforts of Chiang Kai-Shek’s son, Chiang Ching-Kuo, made room for many previously unheard voices in the literary scene, including indigenous, feminist, “military

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compound [juancun],” and gay writers (Chen 26-27). Xiaobing Tang adds that the rise of new voices in the literary scene raises questions about the nature of Taiwan literature that find their roots in the political turmoil of the island:

Should it [Taiwan wenxue, or Taiwan literature in the English translation] be rendered as Taiwanese literature? What, then, would Taiwanese connote? And what would be the relation between this body of literature and Chinese literature? More specifically, what, if any, relation is there among literatures from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China? (51)

Tang’s questions lead back to the issue of Taiwan’s status as an independent government. The many issues surrounding Taiwan literature indicate the difficulty in representing Taiwan, and the extent to which all writers must take Taiwan’s political history into account.

One of the major writers from the Cold War generation, Chang contributes to these efforts by focusing on the negative impact of the political, economic, and cultural exchanges between the U.S. and Taiwan. Chang incorporates issues such as rapid modernization, Americanization, and governmental corruption into his literary works.

The U.S. political and economic support of the Nationalist Party at a time when corruption was rampant—including several well-known cases of human rights violations during the period known as the “White Terror”—means that the U.S. is in part culpable for the problems that Chang identifies in modern Taiwan. Chang’s social commentary focuses on Taiwan during the 1970s-1990s and makes visible cultural exchanges that may otherwise go unnoticed. He does so by closely following the day-to-day lives of

Taiwan’s youngest citizens, its children. Texts like Wild Child and his earlier novel, My

Kid Sister (1993), acknowledge the Cold War global impact of the U.S., and in turn provide a foundation for thinking about how these exchanges might contribute to efforts to imagine a new global future for “America.”

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Wild Child [Ye haizi] takes place in the capital city of Taipei and addresses the anxieties associated with growing up in what Saskia Sassken calls a “global city,” a concentrated site of the transnational exchanges that define globalization (3-4). The novel follows the exploits of a young elementary school child, Shichuan, who, after receiving a phone call from his missing father, leaves home. Shichuan is the ideal figure of the global child, with baggy jeans, Chicago Bulls T-shirt, and American shoes. As

Shichuan struggles to survive in the streets, he finds himself caught in the web of commodity exchanges, money, drugs, prostitution, and other goods associated with the

Taipei underworld.

These exchanges are not immediately identified as global in nature, but

Shichuan’s presence will begin to widen the scope of the problems Chang identifies.

When Shichuan is picked up by a local youth gang, he follows the experienced gang leaders and learns about corruption in Taipei, including the ways money, people, and other valuable commodities are exchanged in a game of power intended to keep mafia leaders and corrupt politicians in control. He also observes American companies alongside local ones, the most prevalent being 7-Eleven. The corruption and modernization of the city spur Shichuan and his new comrades to long for old Taipei. By the end of the novel, the disenchanted youth is left “supposing” how he might forget the troubles caused by the rapid modernization of his beloved city (256).

The adventures of Chang’s young protagonist embody the problems Chang identifies in modern Taipei. Novels like Wild Child demonstrate Chang’s affinity for

“subvert[ing] mainstream views by pointing out the disintegration of fibers that are supposed to tie society together and by doing so register[ing] his deep disapproval of

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the social and political realities of contemporary Taiwan” (Ying 263). Kim-Chu Ng adds that the author “also expresses philosophical doubts about the so-called truths pronounced by those in the know. All these factors reveal his unusual sensitivity with respect to the existing realities of present-day society” (260). Wild Child combines features of Chang’s other literary works, including metafiction, wry humor, and an unreliable narrator. Chang, like his fictional characters, does not trust the truths of those in power, and so he adopts a literary style that negates these “truths” before they can become fully established. Chang continuously plays postmodern tricks on his readers, and he relishes the moments when he can depart from traditional narrative form and challenge his readers’ expectations. This playfulness has led to Chang’s celebrity status in Taiwan, as many on the island appreciate the author’s tendency to break from tradition.9 Chang is also well known for his themes of nostalgia and lost innocence.

Chang’s alter ego, young “Big Head Spring,” appears in his children’s book series and is representative of the predominant themes in his work. In these novels, Chang explores what Taipei has lost in the process of gaining international recognition.

One of the most striking examples of Taiwan’s immersion in a new global economy occurs when protagonist Hou Shichuan first introduces himself and describes his apparel:

I put on a Chicago Bulls T-shirt, on the front of which was the number 23—of course you know who that is. Not long afterward I began to be referred to as “Bull-man,” “that little Bull-boy,” “Bull,” “Bull-tail,” and other related names, and it was all owing to this T-shirt. (140)

9 The popularity of Chang can, in part, be attributed to a shared understanding of the restrictions of military rule that Chang and other Cold War writers experienced. Now, during a time of democracy, these writers can finally speak to the experiences of Taiwan’s people.

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Shichuan’s reference to famous basketball player Michael Jordan is a reminder of the extent to which children now participate in the global economy. Since the novel was originally targeted for a Taiwanese audience, we can assume that Shichuan implies that

Taiwan children have a familiarity with American culture and that they consume these products like their young counterparts who live in the States. Shichuan continues to identify himself in relation to his American products, and demonstrate the extent to which children in Taiwan view these products as a sign of social status. In addition to his signature jeans, Shichuan boasts that he has “American”-made shoes:

Auntie Jade Fragrance brought those shoes to me all the way from America, but printed on the label was MADE IN KOREA. They may not have been anything to show off, but at least they were better than Chen Guoqing’s pair of MADE IN CZECH sneakers, which were really lame— really hopeless. (140-141)

Shichuan’s dismissal of Guoqing’s shoes underscores the importance given by Taiwan youth to American products, even those manufactured in other places. In Shichuan’s opinion, it is the fact that his aunt purchased the shoes in the U.S. store and their association with American culture that most matters.

By casting Shichuan as a commodity-obsessed teenage boy, Chang highlights the contemporary Americanization of Taipei. Ban Wang argues that the globalization of

Taipei has emotional, cultural, and ideological disadvantages that are bound up in the term “modernity,” a word that elicits “visions of the future [that] may promise progress, emancipation, freedom, and universal prosperity” (370). However, Wang concludes that this vision of modernity “is [often] little more than a euphemism to conceal the global standardization and unequal relations that pave the way for the penetration of capital into underdeveloped countries” (370). Chang’s protagonist serves as a particularly effective example of the results of this unequal economic relationship. In addition to

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having the purchasing power associated with children of developed nations, Shichuan also prefers American goods. He is therefore the ideal consumer for U.S. corporations, which in the aftermath of Taiwan’s economic achievement take advantage of ties first formed at the beginning of the Cold War.

Chang’s introduction to Shichuan, while freighted with political significance, is also quite funny. Readers should laugh at the teen as he relates his many nicknames that originate from his T-shirt and the mishap with his new sneakers. Yet Chang will quickly remove the fun from his narrative as he removes his protagonist from his middle-class lifestyle. As Chang makes this transition, he highlights the problems associated with modernization, especially the failed promises that Wang identifies (370).

By contrasting Shichuan with his quick-witted yet spiritually-broken gangster friends,

Chang demonstrates that the wealth associated with modernization is not only unbalanced, but it does not bring the joy or freedom that one might expect.

Such observations, while rooted in local experiences, also have a global component. Many of these instances appear in the form of economic exchange, but these exchanges always have a political undertone. For example, when Shichuan first encounters the members of the gang, he continues to interpret the world through an

American cultural lens. When Shichuan first meets the gang leader Ahzhi, a boy he dubs “Weird Eyes,” he notes that Ahzhi has a “Rambo-style hunting knife” (144). After

Shichuan cashes out of the gambling store where Ahzhi is watching him, he describes his feelings as he follows Ahzhi through the dark streets of Taipei: “I felt like I could have walked all the way to the moon, or even America, but he was still roughly two or three steps ahead of me, continually moving forward to an even more distant place”

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(145). By the time Ahzhi reaches his destination, it is as if Shichuan really has arrived in

America, as he stands at the corner of a 7-Eleven, with its green and orange electric sign beaming in the night. Shichuan’s continued use of America as a point of reference signals the extent to which he is inculcated in American culture.

Shichuan’s description of his walk as one that could presumably take him all the way to America, a place that he suggests might as well be as far off as the moon, emphasizes Shichuan’s obsession with the wealth and prestige he associates with the

US. At the same time, the novel begins to highlight the unequal access in Taiwan to the benefits of modernization. Shichuan is the son of one of the most successful advertisers in Taipei, and he thus has access to the wealth and resources needed to purchase the

American commodities. Based on his easy reference to American popular culture, we can also presume that Shichuan also consumes these exports. But such activities are not accessible to all youth, something Shichuan learns as he mingles with Ahzhi’s gang.

The gang members are all on the streets because they have no choice, and not like

Shichuan because they view it as an opportunity for adventure. Rather than discuss the latest trends in American popular culture, these boys are consumed with worries about gang conspiracies and governmental corruption in Taipei. For example, when relating how his sister was murdered by another gang member, the character Old Bull, one of the older gang members, declares, “what fucking drugs were they [the police] talking about, [my] sister didn’t even drink Coca-Cola” (151). Rather than referencing an

American product as a form of self-promotion, as Shichuan does in his narrative, Old

Bull uses the Coca-Cola reference in an attempt to free his sister from the shame associated with drug addition. Moreover, the way Old Bull inserts his reference to the

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Coca-Cola places more emphasis on crime and corruption, and especially the false accusation of the innocent, rather than on the product itself. The commodity is thereby drained of the cultural power that Shichuan gives it, and instead functions as a minor part of a larger discussion about local politics.

Chang will continue to contrast the privileged Shichuan with his less financially well-off friends. In an ironic twist on Shichuan’s love of American products, Chang introduces a character whose facial features resemble that of an American. Xinjiang, with his wide-set eyes and lighter skin tone, is immediately identified as ethnically different from his friends who are, most likely, Han Chinese.10 These physical differences lead Shichuan to observe Xinjiang in awe as his new friend shouts out in

Chinese:

My gaze panned right where I also saw Little Xinjiang—he really did have the mug of a foreigner, a face almost exactly the same as an American. It was precisely at that moment that he called out in Mandarin with a thick Taiwanese accent—a voice that was at complete odds with his features. (166)

Little Xinjiang’s name derives from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, a province that is populated by a Eurasian mix of people known as the “Uighurs.” Uighurs, as Wild

Child translator Michael Berry indicates, “have distinctly Western features as opposed to

Han Chinese” (163). It is precisely this physical difference that captivates Shichuan, especially when he hears Xinjiang speak in Chinese. The mix of American physical features with the Chinese language is baffling to young Shichuan, who notes that

Xinjiang speaks “with a thick Taiwanese accent” (166). While Shichuan says little else about the boy’s Western features, one can begin to relate his response back to Chang’s

10 As the largest ethnic group in China and Taiwan, the Han Chinese make up 98% of percent of Taiwan’s population.

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literary goals. Concerned predominately with the effects of rapid modernization in

Taipei, Chang inserts a hybrid figure whose looks and actions combine the characteristics of Taiwanese and American culture. In this case, however, the boy strives to fit into Taiwanese culture yet fails to do so because of his Western physical features.

Chang continues to use American cultural references to indicate the loss of cultural identity that comes with life in the global city. For example, upon meeting the female members of the gang, Shichuan describes them in this way:

If you were to ask me, “What about Hoop?” all I could do would be to shrug my shoulders and guess that she was probably something like American Indian. As for Annie, with that green mud mask on her face, she could pretty much pass for ET. (176)

Like ET and American Indians, Hoop and Annie are separated from Taipei’s dominant culture. Yet, importantly, it is not this separation that Shichuan focuses on, but rather his inability to remember his friend’s features. Shichuan describes them by drawing from his repertoire of American cultural references. As he does so, he expresses a deep sadness due to his failure to remember. This loss to recall troubles the boy, who begins to see the difference between knowledge of commercial culture and that of issues that define the city. In order to be fully part of the city, one must be able to remember more than the names of the latest blockbuster hit, one must also have the capacity to recall the people and places one encounters. For Shichuan, the ability to remember these details has been lost, replaced by a global cultural memory. He is a boy of the present, not of the past.

By contrasting the narratives of Shichuan and the gang members, Chang weaves together the threads of his critique of modern Taipei. He shoes how rapid modernization

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has drained youth of the ability to represent the “future,” a duty usually given to them because of their status as citizens-in-progress. Instead, he populates his novel with disenchanted youth who no longer have the ability to envision a life beyond the present.

This inability to imagine a future conflicts with the promises of modernity. With economic progress, children are supposedly able to participate in activities that will make them more successful not less. Yet Chang’s inclusion of the wealthy Shichuan demonstrates that even the children most able to take advantage of the advantages of modernity are also negatively impacted. Chang indicates this through a disclaimer called the

“Junkyard Notice” found in the opening pages: “All that is left in this world are gang leaders, good-for-nothings, and dead people. Teenagers are already a thing of the past”

(133). Chang asks his readers to consider the relationship between Shichuan and the adolescent gang members, and he continually includes cultural references that invite readers to make connections between the turmoil of the teenage characters and those that result from the uneven cultural, political, and economic exchanges that take place between the U.S. and Taiwan. Chang is concerned with the everyday experiences of

Taipei teenagers, but he also frames this experience within a global context.

Chang’s commentary culminates in two pivotal scenes. The first occurs when

Shichuan discovers his face plastered on a giant billboard. Shichuan hides out with his friends in a dirty old hotel in order to escape the wrath of the leader of another gang.

The boy is handed the local newspaper, whose headline reads “COMMERCIAL

QUEEN’S HEART BREAKS THINKING OF LOST SON, CRACKER-JACK HANDS

DESIGN POSTER IN HOPE OF SON’S EARLY RETURN” (210). As Shichuan reads the article detailing his last few days at home before running away, he discovers that he

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is being used by his mother in a larger campaign intended to solve youth problems in the city. Another headline reads, “EXPRESSING ITS CARE FOR THE YOUTH” (210).

Having experienced street life, Shichuan scoffs at these hollow gestures, especially claims to deal with the “increasingly critical nature of adolescent problems” (212). The article in general, and his mother’s plea for him to return home in particular with statements like “eternally searching for you” and “My child! Your mother is here,” is something Shichuan feels “was indeed a little bit like an emotional lyric essay” (211). As a former reporter, Chang is well versed in the conventions of newspapers, and he is noted for his tendency to take real headlines and incorporate them into his literary works. In this particular scene, Chang puts this experience to good use. How can

Shichuan, the son of the “Commercial Queen,” escape modernity? Later, he runs into a giant poster of his “Big Head” (a pun on Chang’s literary alter ego, Big Head Spring).

Through his inclusion of local headlines regarding Taipei youth problems, Chang appears to suggest the futility of trying to oppose the commercial industry, especially by youth who lack the power to resist such pressures.

Chang further supports this conclusion in the final pages of the novel, when

Shichuan plays a storytelling game with his friend, Annie. The two-player language game is determined by the scenario given by the first speaker (the prince/princess). The first speaker must say a line like “I remember I left home, but I don’t remember where I went” and then the second speaker (the “smart man”) must reply “I don’t want to know where you went, I want to know [blank].” By extrapolating upon the information given, the second speaker prompts the first to provide more information about the scenario he

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or she describes. The game ends when the speaker finally remembers what they’ve forgotten, as evident in the following exchange between Shichuan and Annie:

Later—or was it actually before?—I told Annie the story of the roaming prince and the smart man. But I played a trick on her—I changed the prince into a princess. She really liked that story, perhaps because it was so short. After the story I played that game with her. The game was also very short; it ended almost before it began. “I remember I left home, but I can’t recall where I went,” said the princess. “I don’t want to know where you went, I just want to know what you learned,” exclaimed the smart man.” “I remember I learned how to forget, but I don’t remember what I forgot,” said Annie. “I don’t want to know what you forgot,” I said, “I want to know how you forgot.” (256)

When Annie mentions leaving home, Shichuan ignores this prompt and asks instead what she learned. In this manner, Shichuan helps Annie remember what it is she has forgotten. This game, Kim-Chu Ng argues, is one that has its “own grammar and logic:” the game “positions the reader as one who is happy and carefree and who is also a habitual consumer of fiction” (268, 270). In order to follow Shichuan and Annie’s game, readers must be well versed in narrative techniques. That is, they must have the leisure to consume fiction in order to appreciate the game.

While Ng’s analysis of the game’s form is compelling, it does not address how the game’s content further develops the novel’s central themes. Annie and Shichuan’s game underscores how rapid modernization saturates youth with knowledge of commercial culture, while at the same time rendering them unable to remember details of their local culture. Chang’s commentary on rapid modernization continuously raises anxieties about the loss of cultural memory. When children as the very symbols of the future are unable to remember, it does not bode well for the city’s future. The children’s loss of memory goes beyond these trivial examples, and has to do with the ability to

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preserve their culture. Without the capacity to remember the past, the city will exist in a state of perpetual present. This is the reason why the conclusion of Shichuan and

Annie’s game is so haunting. The game is only supposed to conclude once the first speaker remembers what it is he/she has forgotten, yet Chang ends the game prematurely so that readers are left thinking about the process of forgetting rather than that of remembering. Shichuan’s final response of “I want to know how you [Annie] forgot” (256) invites readers to think about what it means to forget, and particularly how this process might relate to the “progress” experienced by Taipei.

While Chang’s conclusions about modern Taipei may seem specific to Taiwan experience, the fact that his child protagonist responds to the effects of U.S. intervention broadens the scope of his project. Wild Child is not just about modern Taiwan, it is also about modern America. As I have shown throughout this chapter, the traces of “America global” are evident within Chang’s text and demonstrate the lasting effects of the U.S.’s

Cold War policies in regard to Taiwan. Read in this context, Shichuan’s experiences and his tendency to refer back to America provide a foundation for rethinking U.S. identity from a global rather than a national perspective. It is Shichuan’s fluid sense of identity, as is evidenced in moments where Taiwan and America collide, that make it possible to move beyond a study of Taiwan identity. From his “American” shoes to his vast amount of knowledge about American popular culture, Shichuan’s active consumption of American products and his whole-hearted acceptance of the value of these products underscore how Shichuan’s childhood is shaped by global forces and how he embodies the experience of childhood in a global era. This experience is one that is becoming familiar to more and more children as globalization impacts childhood,

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and it is an experience that likewise transforms the earlier visions of childhood that developed during the Cold War. Children like Shichuan are not being coopted in an effort to further the U.S.’s agenda abroad; rather, they represent a future in which borders and boundaries, while important, hold less sway than they have in previous historical moments.

If this trend continues, then the child will certainly play an integral role in the process of remapping U.S. identity from a global rather than a national perspective. As I indicated in the introduction to this chapter, the child’s ability to represent a global form of citizenship will certainly impact all nations, yet the history of the child’s relationship to

U.S. national identity in particular suggests that there are specific advantages to placing conversations about the future of “America” into dialogue with those regarding childhood and global citizenship. The figure of the child, from the nation’s very formation, has played a central role in the construction of U.S. identity, and will continue to do so in the future. Moreover, the politics surrounding childhood in a global era provide a useful entryway into the debates surrounding global citizenship, and will provide a bridge from older notions of national identity to new global forms. Political, economic, cultural, and other forms of intervention in foreign affairs during the Cold War have inevitably left a lasting imprint on a number of nations, and these can provide a foundation for rethinking

U.S. identity in a global era. We can position America within a global context precisely because it has and continues to make an impact that resonates beyond the nation’s borders. “America,” much like the child, is an ideological construct that has meanings and associations that will shift in response to historical events and cultural changes.

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While it is difficult to make any definitive claims about the future of “America,” it is certain that the figure of the child will continue to play an important part in it.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Emily A. Murphy enrolled at the University of Florida (UF) as an undergraduate student in 2005. She majored in English for each of her degrees and received her B.A. in 2008 and her M.A. in 2010. Upon the completion of her master’s degree, she determined to enroll in the English department’s doctoral program. Upon completion of her graduate studies, Emily plans to celebrate the end to her years of residence in the

Gainesville area and looks forward to having adventures (academic and otherwise) in the continental US and beyond.

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